Telegram style, telegraph style, telegraphic style, or telegraphese is a clipped way of writing which abbreviates words and packs information into the smallest possible number of words or characters. It originated in the

telegraph Telegraphy is the long-distance transmission of messages where the sender uses symbolic codes, known to the recipient, rather than a physical exchange of an object bearing the message. Thus flag semaphore is a method of telegraphy, whereas ...

age when telecommunication consisted only of short messages transmitted by hand over the telegraph wire. The telegraph companies charged for their service by the number of words in a message, with a maximum of 15 characters per word for a plain-language

telegram Telegraphy is the long-distance transmission of messages where the sender uses symbolic codes, known to the recipient, rather than a physical exchange of an object bearing the message. Thus flag semaphore is a method of telegraphy, whereas pi ...

, and 10 per word for one written in code. The style developed to minimize costs but still convey the message clearly and unambiguously. The related term ''cablese'' describes the style of press messages sent uncoded but in a highly condensed style over

submarine communications cable A submarine communications cable is a cable laid on the seabed between land-based stations to carry telecommunication signals across stretches of ocean and sea. The first submarine communications cables were laid beginning in the 1850s and car ...

s. In the U.S. Foreign Service, cablese referred to condensed telegraphic messaging that made heavy use of abbreviations and avoided use of definite or indefinite articles, punctuation, and other words unnecessary for comprehension of the message.

Antecedents

Before the telegraph age military dispatches from overseas were made by letters transported by rapid sailing ships. Clarity and concision were often considered important in such correspondence. An apocryphal story about the briefest correspondence in history has a writer (variously identified as

Victor Hugo Victor-Marie Hugo, vicomte Hugo (; 26 February 1802 – 22 May 1885) was a French Romanticism, Romantic author, poet, essayist, playwright, journalist, human rights activist and politician. His most famous works are the novels ''The Hunchbac ...

Oscar Wilde Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 185430 November 1900) was an Irish author, poet, and playwright. After writing in different literary styles throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular and influential playwright ...

) inquiring about the sales of his new book by sending the message "?" to his publisher, and receiving "!" in reply.

Telegraphic coded expressions

Through the history of telegraphy, very many dictionaries of telegraphese, codes or

cipher In cryptography, a cipher (or cypher) is an algorithm for performing encryption or decryption—a series of well-defined steps that can be followed as a procedure. An alternative, less common term is ''encipherment''. To encipher or encode i ...

s were developed, each serving to minimise the number of characters or words which needed to be transmitted in order to impart a message; the drivers for this economy were, for telegraph operators, the resource cost and limited bandwidth of the system; and for the consumer, the cost of sending messages. Examples of telegraphic code-words and their equivalent expressions, taken from ''The Adams Cable Codex'' (1894) are: : Note that in the Adams code, the code-words are all actual English words; some telegraph companies charged more for coded messages, or had shorter word-size limits (10-character maximum vs. 15 characters). Compare these to the following examples from the ''A.B.C. Universal Commercial Electric Telegraphic Code'' (1901) all of which are English-like, but invented words: :

Comparison to modern text messaging

In some ways, telegram style was the precursor to the abbreviated language used in

text messaging Text messaging, or texting, is the act of composing and sending electronic messages, typically consisting of alphabetic and numeric characters, between two or more users of mobile phones, tablet computers, smartwatches, desktops/laptops, or ...

or short message standard ( SMS) services such as

Twitter Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...

, referred to as

SMS language Short Message Service (SMS) language or textese is the abbreviated language and slang commonly used in the late 1990s and early 2000s with mobile phone text messaging, and occasionally through Internet-based communication such as email and ins ...

For telegrams, space was at a premium—economically speaking—and abbreviations were used as necessity. This motivation was revived for compressing information into the 160-character limit of a costly SMS before the advent of multi-message capabilities. Length constraints, and the initial handicap of having to enter each individual letter using multiple keypresses on a numeric pad, drove re-adoption of telegraphic style. Continued space limits and high per-message cost meant the practice persisted for some time after the introduction of built-in predictive text assistance. Some who favor predictive entry claim that telegraphing persists, despite it then needing more effort to write (and read); however, many others assert that predictive text generation is usually wrong, and hence find it more tedious and vexing to erase-and-correct predicted text than to turn off auto-text generation and directly enter their messages "telegraph style".

Other languages

In Japanese, telegrams are printed using the

katakana is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji). The word ''katakana'' means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived fr ...

script, one of the few instances in which this script is used for entire sentences. This is a rare context in which someone might see the particle katakana ヲ instead of the equivalent hiragana を; these are virtually never used in words, so they are not in the parts of speech that get substituted into katakana.

Telegram length

The average length of a telegram in the 1900s in the US was 11.93 words; more than half of the messages were 10 words or fewer. According to another study, the mean length of the telegrams sent in the UK before 1950 was 14.6 words or 78.8 characters. For German telegrams, the mean length is 11.5 words or 72.4 characters. At the end of the 19th century the average length of a German telegram was calculated as 14.2 words.

Gallery

File:Telegram Hochiminh.jpg, File:WatsonLloydGeorgeTelegram.jpg, File:Astronomical Telegram John Ritchie.jpg,

References

{{reflist, 25em Shorthand systems Telegraphy Non-fiction genres