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." Students, in particular, experimented with calculators to discover new words.
English version : The "original" attributed example of calculator spelling, which dates from the 1970s, 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. 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. 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).
Scientific and programmer calculators 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): : 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!". ==See also==