A telephone number or phone number is a sequence of numbers used to call from one telephone line to another in a public switched telephone network. When telephone numbers were invented, they were short — as few as one, two or three digits — and were used by people to call a few neighbors. As phone systems have grown and interconnected to encompass the world, telephone numbers have become longer. In addition to telephones, they now access other devices, such as computers and fax machines.
The number contains the information necessary to identify uniquely the intended endpoint for the telephone call. Each such endpoint must have a unique number within the public switched telephone network. Most countries use fixed length numbers (for normal lines at least) and therefore the number of endpoints determines the necessary length of the telephone number. It is also possible for each subscriber to have a set of shorter numbers for the endpoints most often used. These "shorthand" or "speed calling" numbers are automatically translated to unique telephone numbers before the call can be connected. Some special services have their own short numbers (e.g. 9-1-1, 0-0-0, 9-9-9 and 1-1-1, being the Emergency Services numbers for Canada and the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand, respectively.)
Many systems also allow calls within a local area to be made without dialing the local area code. For example, a phone number in North America will start with three numbers (such as 918), which is the area code, followed by seven digits split into sections of three and four (such as 555-1212), which is the local number.
Most telephone networks today are interconnected in the international telephone network, where the format of telephone numbers is standardized by ITU-T in the recommendation E.164, which specifies that the entire number should be 15 digits or shorter, and begin with a country prefix. For most countries, this is followed by an area code or city code and the subscriber number, which might consist of the code for a particular telephone exchange. ITU-T recommendation E.123 describes how to represent an international telephone number in writing or print, starting with a plus sign ("+") and the country code. When calling an international number from a fixed line phone, the + must be replaced with the international call prefix chosen by the country the call is being made from. Some mobile phones allow the + to be entered directly.
The format and allocation of local phone numbers are controlled by each nation's respective government, either directly or by sponsored organizations (such as NANPA overseen by NeuStar Inc.). See Telephone numbering plan.
Before a telephone call is connected, the telephone number must be dialed by the calling party or Caller. The called party might have equipment that presents caller ID before the call is answered.
Business phones
Businesses in the middle 20th century and earlier had a single telephone number for the main telephone switchboard of that business. A switchboard operator would connect the call within the business. If the called party didn't answer, the caller was typically transferred back to the switchboard. With voicemail and more technology, businesses now use Direct Inward Dialing (DID) (Direct Dialing Inwards (DDI) in the UK) lines so that outside callers can call to a specific person in a business. Often, the DID number uses a pattern from the called party's telephone internal extension. For example, within the Acme Corporation, a caller may dial 225 to reach Mr. Smith, but an outside caller may dial 555-9225 to reach Mr. Smith (with the last three digits representing Mr. Smith's extension). Some companies arrange their dial plan to restrict the DDI capability to certain parts of the PABX or Centrex numbering range: Mr Smith on 225 might have it, but Mr Jones on 374 or Mr Brown on 427 would not. If a merger has happened in the past there may even be different exchange codes mapping to different parts of the internal numbering range. DID became an important feature of Centrex.
Some companies have a sufficient need for internal extensions that the whole numbering range following the exchange code represents company extensions. A real example of this in the UK is the former Post Office's headquarters in Central London: the PABX was made an end node exchange in the London Director area, with the code 432. The automanual board was given the extension number 1234, so in the days before all-figure numbering outside callers reached the switchboard by dialing HEA dquarters 1234. The White House in Washington, DC is another example, having the 202-456 exchange.
US phone number history
In the late 1870s the Bell interests started utilizing their patent with a rental scheme, in which they would rent their instruments to individual users who would contract with other suppliers to connect them, for example from home to office to factory. Western Union and the Bell company both soon realized that a subscription service would be more profitable, with the invention of the telephone switchboard or central office. Such an office was staffed by an operator who connected the calls by personal names.
The latter part of 1879 and the early part of 1880 saw the first use of telephone numbers at Lowell, Massachusetts. During an epidemic of measles, the physician, Dr. Moses Greeley Parker, feared that Lowell's four telephone operators might all succumb to sickness and bring about a paralysis of telephone service. He recommended the use of numbers for calling Lowell's more than 200 subscribers so that substitute operators might be more easily trained in the event of such an emergency. Parker was convinced of the telephone's potential, began buying stock, and by 1883 he was one of the largest individual stockholders in both the American Telephone Company and the New England Telephone and Telegraph Company.
Even after the assignment of numbers, operators still connected most calls into the early 20th century; "Hello Central, get me Underwood-342." Connecting through operators or "Central" was the norm until mechanical direct-dialing of numbers became more common in the 1920s.
In rural areas with magneto crank telephones connected to party lines, the local phone number consisted of the line number plus the ringing pattern of the subscriber. To dial a number such as "3R122" meant making a request to the operator the third party line (if making a call off your own local one), followed by turning the telephone's crank once, a short pause, then twice and twice again. Also common was a code of long and short rings, so one party's call might be signaled by two longs and another's by two longs followed by a short. It was not uncommon to have over a dozen ring cadences (and subscribers) on one line.
In North America, the digits 2–9 of phone numbers were allotted 3 letters of the alphabet apiece. This left room for only 24 letters, so the uncommon letters Q and Z were omitted. In the UK, the letters O and Q were allocated to the digit 0, to reduce caller confusion among similar characters; digit 6 had only M and N, and digit 7 had P, R and S.
Phone numbers were usually not strictly numeric until the mid-1960s. From the 1920s until then, most urban areas had "exchanges" of two letters, followed by numbers. In the UK, however, exchanges in the major cities with Director installations were represented by three letters followed by four numbers; the letters usually represented the name of the exchange area (e.g. MAY fair, WAT erloo), or something memorable about the locality (e.g. POP esgrove — an area where Alexander Pope once lived). This was considered easier to remember, although in London in the later part of this period it required the memorization of 7 characters (roughly the same number of characters as is usual for local calling in 2008). A word would represent the first two digits to be dialed, for example "TWinbrook" for "89" ; "BYwater" for "29". UK numbers had no letters at all except for those in the Director areas, where the first three of the seven digits were assigned letters, and written " ABB ey 1234" or " WHI tehall 1212", for example. A lack of pronounceable words, and the fact that most telephones world-wide have no letters on anyway, have led to the abandonment of letter usage in directory numbers except for publicity purposes.
The use of numbers starting in 555- ( KL ondike-5) to represent fictional numbers in U.S. movies, television, and literature originated in this period. The "555" prefix was reserved for telephone company use and was only consistently used for Directory Assistance (Information), being "555-1212" for the local area. An attempt to dial a 555 number from a movie in the real world will always result in an error message when dialed from a phone in the United States. This reduces the likelihood of nuisance calls. Also, QU incy(5-5555) was used, because there was no Q available. Phone numbers were traditionally tied down to a single location; because exchanges were "hard-wired", the first 3 digits of any number were tied to the geographic location of the exchange.
Alphanumeric telephone numbers in popular culture
Because the switches were hard-wired together and fairly hard to re-wire (or re-grade ), telephone exchange buildings in many larger cities in
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