Harebrained Idea #2: Make Words from your Phone Number

Recently I went through the rigamarole of buying a cell phone for the first time. Yes, there was pain. But now I like my handy little connected toy.

In the sales process I had the opportunity to choose my phone number. The sales rep turned the screen on her terminal to show me the search function for the system and we scrolled through numbers looking for one that we thought would be easy to remember. We settled on the one I now have listed on my contact page: 604-788-1502. I like the phonetics and dialing pattern of it best. Then I thought a little more about it.

What if I could have seen some words that my phone number might have created. By using the letters on the keypad - a practice becoming more common all the time with increased usage of text messaging - almost every number spells something. A friend who I fish with used to have FISH as the last 4 digits of his phone number, which made it fantastically easy to remember anytime I needed to call him.

So how about buiding a software application that takes your phone number (or potential phone number, in my case when I was in the store choosing) and translates the numbers to letters, then runs those letters through a matching dictionary to produce a list of real-word results. In an ideal world those results would also be ranked for relevance, or popularity of the words or word combinations. Then when someone asks your number you have an expression to pass on instead of a semi-random string of numbers. (Semi-random because the area code and first three digits (NPA-NXX) are traditionally set by geography.)

So, any coders out there want to give it a shot? Or, tell me why I’m loony.

Dah! Someone’s already invented it: PhoneSpell!