NAME

       letterize_ - phone-number to letter-mnemonic generator

SYNOPSIS

       letterize nnnnnnn

DESCRIPTION

       This program tries to help you find a letter mnemonic matching a given phone number.

       It emits to standard output each possible pronounceable mnemonic, one per line, using the
       American standard mapping of dial letters to numbers (2 goes to ABC, 3 to DEF, 4 to GHI, 5
       to JKL, 6 to MNO, 7 to PRS, 8 to TUV, 9 to XYZ).

       The program uses a table of pronounceable letter-triples derived from a dictionary scan.
       Each potential mnemonic must be such that all of its letter-triples are in the table to be
       emitted. About 30% of possible triples are considered pronounceable.

       A typical 7-digit phone number has 19,683 possible mnemonics, 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.

       It's best to leave out punctuation such as dashes and parens.

BUGS

       The filtering method doesn't know what plausible medial triples are not reasonable at the
       beginnings and ends of words.

       I'm not sure what table position 0 (which is what 0 and 1 are mapped to) means. If you
       figure it out, you tell me. I really should have generated my own table, but that would
       have been more work than this seemed worth -- if your number contains either, you probably
       need to generate your mnemonic in disjoint pieces around the digits anyway.

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.