Make a word from my phone number

Using This Solver

Trying to find a memorable phone number? This phone number word finder finds words you can spell with your phone number. These words are often called phonewords and are much easier for people to remember and share with their friends. You can use this tool to help select a custom phone number (aka vanity phone number) for your business or find possible ways to refer the phone number you already have.

The results are ranked by a quality score, which places the best words first(usually the longest words with the best position within the phone number); tab through the results to see the rest of the words.

You can also use this tool to help solve puzzles based on phonepad letters. We’ve seen
a couple of these; some of these will appear as simple number sequences. More advanced ones take advantage of the fact the phone pad is a 3 x 4 grid and share the progression
between the spots on the grid vs. the actual number itself.

How This Solver Works

This is a phonetic alphabet solver, used to help you find a words that can be made using a phone keypad (phone word). These are easier to remember than phone numbers and can be used to create interesting mnemonics. This is helpful if you’re trying to pick business phone numbers (part of your company name) or a vanity number (for your cell number or cell phone app). This can increase your phone call volume by helping you make odd combinations memorable (so a caller remembers your business); it looks at generic words you can link into the number, along with the remaining letters.

To use the phone word solver , simply enter the telephone number (including area code for calls) and it will examine your options. This phone word solver uses the nato phonetic alphabet using a standard telephone keypad (device). It supports local number, toll free number and country code patterns as well. (Although it may find a reduced number of possible word combinations as it runs the process to convert phone number to words). You will need to check with the phone company if this is an existing phone number. There are third party providers who can help you with this as well. Special rules limit mobile number in various countries (mobile phone number policies); check for available number and existing number limits. You can also include an extra digit for certain systems (your smartphone or iphone may not handle this consistently; standards vary).

This website is powered by a flexible dictionary search engine (that powers our scrabble helper. This dictionary search takes a sequence of letters and iterates through the possible words which you can form with those letters by swapping them around. So given a letter series EPHON, it looks at all of the possible ways to rearrange the letters into sequences which match actual words yielding PHONE. It accomplishes this in under a second, on the server side — it may take slightly longer for the data to move back & forth via the internet.

The phone number word search is a modified version of this dictionary search engine; every letter in the sequence maps to several possible values (eg. 1 => A, B, C). We iterate through each digit in the number, constructing a word out of each of the possible options for each number in sequence using the phone pad letters. These possible words are compared with the dictionary to eliminate fruitless paths (eg. once we’re comfortable the first three letters in a possible phone number word cannot be used to spell anything, we stop searching for sequences that include part of the stream).

Unlike the scrabble solver search, the engine has been set to tolerate a little bit of junk letters / numbers in the word. In the real world, many successful phonewords have blended short words (3 — 4 letters) with additional digits before or after the word. So once we see «a legitimate word» in one of the possible paths, we will usually keep the resulting options.

Which brings us to the «quality function» used to rank results. Most real world users have a preference for longer words or word pairs, which will consume most of the phone number. There is also a preference for phone words where the additional digits have been placed in an obvious and easily remembered spot, such as the middle three digits or the last four digits (such as 555-SORT or EAT-1234). After we generate a (usually large) list of possible phone words, we have a ranking function that sorts these into order based on their expected desirability.

For fun, I wrote a script to convert the last four digits (or fewer) of a phone number into a valid word. I wanted to see if my personal phone number could be converted into something like «999-9999-BEAR.» I used the unix words file as my dictionary.

I’m wondering how I could make this simpler, since there seems to be a lot of repetition within the function. I’d also like to expand it to consider more digits of the phone number.

I am mostly self taught with Python, so please let me know if I can do anything to make my code prettier!

import pandas as pd

words_df = pd.read_csv(r'C:PythonScriptsData_Playgroundunix_words.csv',encoding='latin1')

words_list = words_df['WORDS'].tolist()

phone_dict = {
    '0':None,
    '1':None,
    '2':['a','b','c'],
    '3':['d','e','f'],
    '4':['g','h','i'],
    '5':['j','k','l'],
    '6':['m','n','o'],
    '7':['p','q','r','s'],
    '8':['t','u','v'],
    '9':['w','x','y','z']
}

my_number = '0000009376' # zero example
#my_number = '0000003357' # eels example

def generate_words(phone_number):

    winners = []

    num = str(phone_number[-4:])
    first_letter = ''
    second_letter = ''
    third_letter = ''
    fourth_letter = ''

    if '0' in num or '1' in num:
        print('Sorry, your phone number contains a "0" and/or a "1" and cannot be converted.')

    else:    
        #print('Starting number: {0}'.format(num))

        for i in range(len(phone_dict[num[:1]])):
            first_letter = phone_dict[num[:1]][i]

            for j in range(len(phone_dict[num[1:2]])):
                second_letter = phone_dict[num[1:2]][j]

                potential_word = first_letter + second_letter
                if potential_word in words_list:
                    winners.append(potential_word)

                for k in range(len(phone_dict[num[2:3]])):
                    third_letter = phone_dict[num[2:3]][k]

                    potential_word = first_letter + second_letter + third_letter
                    if potential_word in words_list:
                        winners.append(potential_word)

                    for l in range(len(phone_dict[num[3:4]])):
                        fourth_letter = phone_dict[num[3:4]][l]

                        potential_word = first_letter + second_letter + third_letter + fourth_letter
                        #print(potential_word)
                        if potential_word in words_list:
                            winners.append(potential_word)

        if len(winners) == 0:
            print('n No Winners. :(')

        else:                            
            print('nWinners! n')
            for winner in winners:
                full_winner = my_number[:(len(my_number)-len(winner))] + winner.upper()
                formatted_winner = full_winner[:3] + '-' + full_winner[3:6] + '-' + full_winner[6:]
                print(formatted_winner)

generate_words(my_number)

Phone numbers that spell things aren’t just for corporations with fancy 1-800 numbers; odds are even your phone number spells something. If you’re wondering what words might be hidden in your number check out Phone Number to Word. This web service lets you convert telephone number into words and see a list of all possible letter combinations that number allows for.

The amount of information this site gives is overwhelming,  but if you’re wondering whether a certain word is in there you can always «Ctl» and «f» your way through it. Alternatively, you can scroll until a word pops out at you.

An unfortunate thing about this service: it only deals with 7-number phone numbers. In this age of cell phones this strikes me as less useful than perhaps it would have seemed in the era of land-lines and long distance.

• Find words hidden in your phone number.
• Shows all possible letter combination in any 7-digit phone number.
• Overwhelming amount of information.
• Similar tool: PhoneSpell

Check out Phone Number to Word @ www.labrocca.com/phone