Pager codes

Type a code and you get its meaning, with the reasoning where there is one. Several codes can go in at once, separated by spaces. A number that isn't a listed code is read upside down, calculator style, which is how most spelled-out pages worked. Swap the boxes to type a phrase, such as I love you, and get the codes for it.

From also offers Text to Keypad presses: old phone multi-tap typing, where hello is 44 33 555 555 666, and back again.

A numeric pager could show only digits. In the 1990s teenagers turned that into a language. Some codes counted letters, so 143 is I love you, one letter, then four, then three. Others spelled words upside down, the way calculators did, so 07734 is hello. Others again borrowed numbers people already knew, like 911 for an emergency.

These codes come from a list the Los Angeles Times printed in November 1997, in a story on what it called pager-speak. As the story says, many codes were a local dialect known to one group of friends, so a code may have meant something else to whoever sent it. The paper also reported Spanish and Korean codes, 50538 for besos (kisses) and 8282, which sounds like "hurry, hurry" in Korean.

When text messages arrived on phones with only a number pad, each key carried three or four letters, 2 for ABC up to 9 for WXYZ. Pressing a key once gave its first letter, twice the second, and so on. Hello took 13 presses. Two letters on the same key, like the l and l in hello, needed a pause between them, which the translator shows as a space. Predictive text later made most of this unnecessary.