Calculator spelling is an
unintended characteristic of the
seven-segments display traditionally used by
calculators, in which, when read upside-down, the digits resemble letters of the
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and th ...
. Each digit may be mapped to one or more letters, creating a limited but functional
subset of the alphabet, sometimes referred to as ''beghilos'' (or ''beghilosz'').
Applications
Aside from novelty and amusement, calculator spelling has limited utility. The popularity of
pager
A pager (also known as a beeper or bleeper) is a wireless telecommunications device that receives and displays alphanumeric or voice messages. One-way pagers can only receive messages, while response pagers and two-way pagers can also acknow ...
s in the 1990s gave rise to a form of
leetspeak
Leet (or "1337"), also known as eleet or leetspeak, is a system of modified spellings used primarily on the Internet. It often uses character replacements in ways that play on the similarity of their glyphs via reflection or other resemblanc ...
called pagerspeak.
[Pager Language , Teens Create Language of Pager-Speak - Los Angeles Times](_blank)
/ref> Students, in particular, experimented with calculators to discover new words.
English
:
The "original" attributed example of calculator spelling, which dates from the 1970s,BOOBIES
A booby is a seabird in the genus ''Sula'', part of the family Sulidae. Boobies are closely related to the gannets (''Morus''), which were formerly included in ''Sula''.
Systematics and evolution
The genus ''Sula'' was introduced by the Fren ...
". Another early example of calculator spelling offered the sequence 0.7734, which becomes "hello
''Hello'' is a salutation or greeting in the English language. It is first attested in writing from 1826. Early uses
''Hello'', with that spelling, was used in publications in the U.S. as early as the 18 October 1826 edition of the '' Norwich ...
", or could also be written as “0.1134”.
Scientific and programmer calculators
Scientific calculator
A scientific calculator is an electronic calculator, either desktop or handheld, designed to perform mathematical operations. They have completely replaced slide rules and are used in both educational and professional settings.
In some are ...
s that feature hexadecimal readout using the letters ''A'' through ''F'' offer more flexibility. Using a scientific calculator with hex capability, the earlier "5318008" example can be improved with the A–F keys to spell "B00B1E5", without needing to rotate the display (a practice known as hexspeak Hexspeak, like leetspeak, is a novelty form of variant English spelling using the hexadecimal digits. Created by programmers as memorable magic numbers, hexspeak words can serve as a clear and unique identifier with which to mark memory or data.
H ...
or Base 16).
:
Students often use this capability and the improved "alpha" feature that use the letters "A" through "Z" to write messages, separating words by using the minus sign ("-") or other punctuation.
In some calculators that use dot matrix displays, a factorial product sign ("!") can be used to add emphasis. For example, "B00B1E5!".
See also
* Ambigram
An ambigram is a calligraphic design that has several interpretations as written.
The term was coined by Douglas Hofstadter in 1983. Most often, ambigrams appear as visually symmetrical words. When flipped, they remain unchanged, or they mutate ...
* ASCII art
* Emoticon
An emoticon (, , rarely , ), short for "emotion icon", also known simply as an emote, is a pictorial representation of a facial expression using characters—usually punctuation marks, numbers, and letters—to express a person's feelings, ...
* Hexspeak Hexspeak, like leetspeak, is a novelty form of variant English spelling using the hexadecimal digits. Created by programmers as memorable magic numbers, hexspeak words can serve as a clear and unique identifier with which to mark memory or data.
H ...
* Leet
Leet (or "1337"), also known as eleet or leetspeak, is a system of modified spellings used primarily on the Internet. It often uses character replacements in ways that play on the similarity of their glyphs via reflection or other resemblance. ...
speek
* Phoneword
Phonewords are mnemonic phrases represented as alphanumeric equivalents of a telephone number. In many countries, the digits on the telephone keypad also have letters assigned. By replacing the digits of a telephone number with the correspondin ...
* Seven-segment display character representations
* Translit
Informal or ''ad hoc'' romanizations of Cyrillic have been in use since the early days of electronic communications, starting from early e-mail and bulletin board systems.
* Transformation of text
Transformations of text are strategies to perform geometric transformations on text (reversal, rotations, etc.), particularly in systems that do not natively support transformation, such as HTML, seven-segment displays and plain text.
Implementa ...
References
Further reading
* Heinrich Hemme: ''Die Hölle der Zahlen - 92 mathematische Rätsel mit ausführlichen Lösungen'', page 19/73 (German)
External links
Calculator Haikus
nbsp;– Some examples and a report of finding a total of 118 English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ide ...
words possible to display using the upside-down technique
A list of 250 calculator-spellable English words
nbsp;– A list of calculator spelling words generated by regular expression
A regular expression (shortened as regex or regexp; sometimes referred to as rational expression) is a sequence of characters that specifies a search pattern in text. Usually such patterns are used by string-searching algorithms for "find" ...
search
Topsy-Turvy Calculator
nbsp;– An upside-down calculator
– A list of calculator-spellable Spanish
Spanish might refer to:
* Items from or related to Spain:
**Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain
**Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries
**Spanish cuisine
Other places
* Spanish, Ontario, Can ...
words, and Logo
A logo (abbreviation of logotype; ) is a graphic mark, emblem, or symbol used to aid and promote public identification and recognition. It may be of an abstract or figurative design or include the text of the name it represents as in a wo ...
code to convert them to numbers
The Ultimate List
nbsp;– An 824 word list and an extended 1455 word list of English words possible to display on an upside down calculator, HTML
The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaSc ...
code to aid their creation plus three 'micro stories' using only the available words.
251 words you can spell with a calculator. – Present&Correct
251 words you can spell with a calculator. (10/27/13)
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Calculators
Spelling