LETTERIZE(1)

📦
version 1.6 · 5 versions
, in ubuntu stonking

💖 LETTERIZE(1) — the phone-number-to-letter-mnemonic generator bestie 💖

okay so literally the whole vibe here is: you've got a phone number, you want a cute word for it, and letterize is the girl who does that for you. phone-number to letter-mnemonic generator, that's her. no cap. 👑

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

letterize [word...]

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so this program? it's here to help you find a letter mnemonic that matches a given phone number. that's the whole mission, that's the assignment, and she ate. 🫶

it emits to standard output every possible pronounceable mnemonic, one per line, using the American standard mapping of dial letters to numbers, which is:

  • 2 goes to ABC
  • 3 goes to DEF
  • 4 goes to GHI
  • 5 goes to JKL
  • 6 goes to MNO
  • 7 goes to PRS
  • 8 goes to TUV
  • 9 goes to XYZ

and any characters that are not in this set? they just get passed through. no notes, they simply vibe on by. 💅

the program uses a table of pronounceable letter-triples derived from a dictionary scan. each potential mnemonic has to have all of its letter-triples in that table to get emitted at all — like, full table membership or she's not coming to the party. about 30% of possible triples are considered pronounceable. periodt. 🎀

a typical 7-digit phone number has 19,683 possible mnemonics, which is lowkey unhinged, but this test usually cuts the list down to a few hundred or so — a reasonable number to eyeball-check. for some numbers the list will, sadly, be empty. 😭 i know. it happens.

pro tip from the original author, and it's giving real ones only: it's best to leave out punctuation such as dashes and parentheses.

💀 BUGS 💀

  • the filtering method doesn't know what plausible medial triples are not reasonable at the beginnings and ends of words. it's just out here not knowing. 🙈
  • I'm not sure what table position 0 means — which is what 0 and 1 are mapped to. if you figure it out, you tell me. fr fr. I really should have generated my own table, but that would have been more work than this seemed worth. 💀

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Eric S. Raymond esr@snark.thyrsus.com. it's based on a table of plausible letter-triples that had no name attached to it. surf to http://www.catb.org/~esr/ for updates and related resources. 🌈

okay bestie that's the whole page, mwah, go mnemonic-ify something iconic and remember: the vibes are pronounceable but the facts are fixed. 💖✨ This was LETTERIZE(1), dated 2026-04-24 — xoxo, your fave manual, signing off. 🦋🌸

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