Okay, readers, here is your opportunity to aid in the cause of Science! I am doing some preliminary research on how people read numbers in various contexts, focusing initially on phone numbers (North American format). This poll is designed to help me develop further research questions; I'm not using the results directly as data, so I'm not
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Depends on how big your area is... I've seen phone numbers with everything from 3 to 8 digits, and the most common in the places I grew up happened to be 5 and 7!
And in my experience, numbers tend to be grouped whichever way is convenient; if there are patterns that make the number easier to remember, you might say it that way even if it means that you group 3 digits together instead of 2.
That said, the default seems to be to group in twos starting from the end, with an initial single digit possible going with the next pair.
For example, here in Hamburg, many older phone numbers are seven digits, and I'd typically recite them as 3+2+2 (for example, 7631701 as 763 17 01 "sieben-sechs-drei, eins-sieben, null-eins").
But my parents' phone number, 54542, was "fünf-vier, fünf-vier, zwei" since that took advantage of the grouping, even though the "official" standard is "5 45 42". And someone once read it back to me as "vierundfünfzig, fünf, zweiundvierzig" and I had to think before I realised that he meant the same number.
My current phone number has eight digits and I read it as 4+4... or maybe as (2+2)+(2+2), with a bigger pause in the middle and a very small one after digits 2 and 6.
My work number has six digits + extensions, and I read it as 3+3(+2) (797 007-xx), perhaps to take advantage of the rhythm with a "7" at the end of each group. I've also said "79 70 07-xx", though, i.e. 2+2+2(+2).
Summary: in my experience, there's no hard-and-fast rule about how to say numbers here, and it depends quite a bit on the length of the number and the digits that make it up.
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