Phone number reading: an experimental poll

[forthright]

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

Comments

[sorceror]

I hope you aren't looking for consistency!

[norton_gale]

What are you trying to prove with this survey? Does it have to do with the way people parse numerical information?

[forthright]

I'm not trying to prove anything, per se. I'm interested in how the visual/graphic representation of phone numbers (and more broadly, any numbers) influence their lexical representation when read aloud / spoken. So, for instance, reading digit by digit instead of as complete 'grammatical' English numerals is an example of this.

[burning_purple]

I'm really easily thrown off by numbers and my preferred method of giving out phone numbers (and repeating them back when I'm receiving them) is saying each digit individually. That said, I can UNDERSTAND, but never use phone numbers spoken with the last 4 digits turned into two two-digit numbers, but I can't recall every using that myself. And anything else I have to get somone to repeat usually 5 or 6 times so I can make certain I'm transcribing it correctly.

The worst incident with that someone with a slight accept was giving me a number that ended in something like 2058, and she was saying Twenty-fifty-eight, which left me trying to figure out what the fourth digit was because in my head I was turning it into 258 :)

[calvinahobbes]

Very interesting poll, I'll be checking back for answers. I won't fill out the poll myself, though, since I'm European and it feels like cheating :o). I actually encountered the problem of reciting phone numbers (and memorizing them) many times when I lived in the US. It seemed to me there was no easy (or consistently used) way of doing it, as opposed to my native country where we have 8-digit numbers. The first two digits then signify the area code - the nearly-exclusive way of reading those numbers is by dividing them into 2-digit numbers, such as 55 01 99 10 (fifty-five, oh-one, ninety-nine, ten). Recently companies with what would correspond to US 800-numbers have begun to use 3-digit readings such as 55 100 100 which is obviously easier to remember than 55 10 01 00. Sorry for going off on a tangent. As I said, very interesting.

PS: I friended you via your website.

[cheesymarzipan]

though not used to american phone numbers, I tried to fill it in as if I was...(if that makes sense), as a UK person I'm more used to six-digit (after area code) numbers which I tend to split into 2 lots of three (unless 3 lots of two is more memorable eg my work number ends in 1010 so that's 3 x 2; my home phone number the first and fourth digits are the same so that's 2 x 3)

anyway - two zeros without a prefix (as in your second example) I'd say double oh (or double zero), otherwise it would be xx hundred. I only tend to split up numbers into twos and threes, so 1200 would be twelvehundred or twelve double zero, not one thousand two hundred (I'd probably interpret that as 1000-200)

[bopeepsheep]

A lot of UK numbers are in this 3-4 format and have been for years, including pre-020 London numbers (e.g. (0-1) 6-3-7[breath]4-3-4-3, which used to be Radio 1!), and numbers in cities like Birmingham, Manchester, Edinburgh, etc.

The 'hundred' issue is interesting - I guess we do say 0800 as oh-eight-hundred (or oh-eight-thousand for the newer numbers), but I'll say eight-one-five-eight-double-oh in a 6 digit number.