Calculator spelling

File:Calculator watch.jpg

Aside from novelty and amusement, calculator spelling has limited utility. The popularity of pagers in the 1990s gave rise to a form of leetspeak called "pager-speak."[https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-nov-26-mn-57816-story.html Pager Language | Teens Create Language of Pager-Speak - Los Angeles Times] Students, in particular, experimented with calculators to discover new words.

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The "original" attributed example of calculator spelling, which dates from the 1970s,{{cite book|author1=Tom Dalzell|author2=Terry Victor|title=The Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Ak6cBQAAQBAJ&q=5318008&pg=PA2060|date=27 November 2014|publisher=Taylor & Francis|isbn=978-1-317-62511-7|page=2060}} is 5318008, which when turned over spells "BOOBIES". Another early example of calculator spelling offered the sequence 0.7734, which becomes "hello", or could also be written as 0.1134.{{cite web|title=Words that can be written on a calculator |url=http://everything2.com/title/Words+that+can+be+written+on+a+calculator |work=Everything2 |publisher=Everything Development Co. | date=2000-03-13 }} The 1979 album Five Three One - Double Seven O Four by The Hollies encodes the band's name in calculator spelling ("hOLLIES"). Other words possible with the traditional "BEghILOSZ" set include "loose", "shell", "BEIgE", "gOBBLE", "gOOgLE", and many others. Among the longest are "hILLBILLIES" and "SLEIghBELLS" at 11, "gLOSSOLOgIES" and "BIBLIOLOgIES" at 12 letters, and "hEEBEEgEEBEES" at 13 letters, although the latter is not listed under that spelling in the Oxford Dictionary. Fittingly, glossology is the scientific study of language and linguistics. Another common case, 7734206, spells "gO 2 hELL" (or, alternately, 7734209 spells "GO 2 hELL"). 8008 is special in that it can spell "BOOB" upside-down or right-side up. 71077345 spells "SHELLOIL". There are also a couple of names that can be calculator-spelled. For example, 318830=DEBBIE, 7718=BILL, 46137=LEIgh, 5107=LOIS, 31773=ELLIE, 31717173=ELI LILIE (in Polish: lily flowers of Elisabeth), 302=ZOE and 451713 317718=BILLIE EILISh.{{citation needed|date=April 2025}}

The calculator spelling 304 eventually entered common slang in the 2020s as a euphemism for a promiscuous woman (hOE, although the traditional spelling of "ho" in that sense lacks an e, and 304 more accurately spells the garden tool).{{Cite web |last=Johnson |first=Stephen |date=2025-02-01 |title='Mewing,' 'Sigma,' and Other Gen Z and Gen Alpha Slang You Might Need Help Decoding |url=https://lifehacker.com/entertainment/guide-to-gen-z-and-gen-alpha-slang |access-date=2025-02-02 |website=Lifehacker |language=en}}

Scientific calculators that feature hexadecimal readout offer more flexibility. This allows the letters A through F to also be used (a practice known as hexspeak or Base 16):

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Students often use this capability and the improved "alpha" feature that uses 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!".

• Ambigram
• ASCII art
• Emoticon
• Hexspeak
• Leetspeek
• Phoneword
• Transformation of text

{{reflist}}

• {{cite book |first=Heinrich |last=Hemme |title=Die Hölle der Zahlen - 92 mathematische Rätsel mit ausführlichen Lösungen |pages=19,73 |language=German }}

• [http://latteier.com/calculator/ Calculator Haikus] – Some examples and a report of finding a total of 118 English words possible to display using the upside-down technique
• [http://paperlined.org/apps/wikipedia/offsite_content/Calculator_spelling.txt A list of 250 calculator-spellable English words] – A list of calculator spelling words generated by regular expression search
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20111203021230/http://www.haugk.co.uk/ttc/ Topsy-Turvy Calculator] – An upside-down calculator
• [http://neoparaiso.com/logo/historias-de-calculadora.html Historias de Calculadora] {{in lang|es}} – A list of calculator-spellable Spanish words, and Logo code to convert them to numbers
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20111203050059/http://calculatorwords.yolasite.com/ The Ultimate List] – An 824-word list and an extended 1455-word list of English words possible to display on an upside-down calculator, HTML code to aid their creation, plus three 'micro stories' using only the available words.
• [http://blog.presentandcorrect.com/250-words-you-can-spell-with-a-calculator 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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Category:Calculators

Category:Spelling