Calculator spelling

Calculator spelling (also known as beghilos; see Description, below) is a technique of spelling words by reading characters upside-down from calculators equipped with certain kinds of seven-segment displays.

Description

An unintended characteristic of the seven-segment display is that many numbers, when read upside-down, appear as letters of the Latin alphabet. Each digit can be mapped to a unique letter, creating a limited but functional subset of the alphabet, sometimes called the beghilos alphabet.

On a calculator, this appears as:

Certain calculators omit the topmost stem on the digit "6" and the bottommost stem on the "9". In such cases, "6" renders a lowercase "q" when turned upside-down, and "9" appears as a lowercase "b".

Only certain calculators are capable of being used for beghilos calculator spelling. LCD, VFD, LED, and Panaplex displays are best for spelling words. The ability of dot-matrix displays, fourteen-segment and sixteen-segment displays to render most characters, defeats the purpose of spelling with a limited alphabet.

Applications

Aside from novelty and amusement, calculator spelling has limited practicality. Students, in particular, are known to experiment with calculators to find what words are possible.

Calculator spelling can be used in programming as a form of textual feedback on devices with limited output ability. The programmer is given a wider set of letters to use and does not require the reader to turn the device upside-down. This is particularly useful in scientific calculators that feature hexadecimal readout using the letters "A" through "F". Students often use this feature and an improved "alpha" feature that use the letters "A" through "Z" to write messages to each other, separating words by using the minus sign ("-").

One of the most common applications of beghilos calculator spelling is done by students, often when bored during a mathematics lesson. The 'original' attributed example of calculator spelling which dates from the 1970s, [The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (2006), Eric Partridge, Tom Dalzell, Terry Victor, pp. 2160] is 5318008, which when turned over spells "BOOBIES". Using a scientific calculator with hex capability, this can be further improved, with the A–F keys and the "!" sign, to spell "b00b1E5!", without needing to rotate the display. Another common example of calculator spelling is the sequence 0.7734 (when turned upside down, this becomes "hEllo").

Calculator spelling is also used in other languages. An example in Dutch is 707 + 707 = 1414. In calculator spelling this is LOL + LOL = hIhI. The word LOL, means fun and hihi is the Dutch spelling for "heehee" (laughter). In Portuguese, 50135 (upside down 'SEIOS'), means 'breasts'.

Hip hop slang applications include the sequence 3722145 which spells "SHIZZLE".

ee also

* ASCII art
* Emoticon
* Hexspeak
* Leet speek
* Translit

Popular culture

*The Dutch rock band 35007's name comes from the calculator-spelling of the word "Loose".
*In The Fairly OddParents TV movie "School's Out! The Musical" Flappy Bob types 07734 on the calculator during the song "Where is the Fun?", which when turned upside down spells Hello.

References

* "Rechnerspielereien", 1973, Publisher Gundig de icon; translates directly as "Calculator Games". (No ISBN or author available.)

External links

* [http://latteier.com/calculator/ Calculator Haikus] – Some examples and a report of finding a total of 118 English words possible to display using the upside-down technique
* [http://paperlined.org/apps/wikipedia/offsite_content/Calculator_spelling.txt A list of 250 calculator-spellable English words] – A list of calculator spelling words generated by regular expression search
* [http://lutz-buech.de/index.php/content/view/66/49/ Taschencode Advanced] de icon – Software to emulate an upside-down calculator (MS Windows only)
* [http://neoparaiso.com/logo/historias-de-calculadora.html Historias de Calculadora] es icon – A list of calculator-spellable Spanish words, and Logo code to convert them to numbers