Saturday, December 13, 2008

Help to decipher the text messages


The world of text messaging is evolving so fast that honestly its becoming difficult for me to keep track of the 'text slangs'. If you are in a situation like me then dont worry help is at hand.

ITPro published an article recently reporting that the 'Post Office' (yup you read it correctly) has released a guide that lists lot of common slangs being used for texting. A word of caution would be that some of the terms are specific to Brits so they may not be applicable in other english speaking countries.

Some of the interesting terms listed are:

  • ATM - At the moment
  • 4EVA - Forever
  • Code 18 - Someone who is bad at using technology
  • 404 - Clueless
  • BAB - Boring
  • P999 - Parent Alert (Note 999 is emergency number in UK. So this would become P911 in US, P112 in Europe and P100 in India)
  • GOOD job - Get Out Of Debt job
  • Code 11 - Old Fashioned (London specific)
  • 143 - I Love You (more commonly used one is ILU)

The guide is available from the Post office site here. (Ftp link for PDF)

There is also a very interesting book called "Txtng: the gr8 db8" that was published not too long ago.




The book is not expensive and I found it very interesting as it contains loads of useful information and statistics. The best thing is that in the end it contains very detailed list of text abbreviations, not only in english but also in 11 other languages (using english charachters though) including Chinese, French, Italian, Spanish and Welsh.

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