The Joy of Text

Despite its ubiquity, text messaging is still infuriatingly fiddly. Mobile buttons seem to have been designed for only the nimblest of virtuoso-pianist fingers, and a hurried txt often results in a confused mess of superfluous letters. Even if every care is taken over precision-pressing, there is still the spectre of the predictive text synonym (coined here as the textonym or ‘txtonym’) to contend with – the set of words in English that are made up of the same sequence of key-presses. For example, pub and rub are both ‘spelt’ 7‑8‑2.

Here, an exhaustive search of all possible txtonyms is performed, in order to warn people of the worst pitfalls to be avoided as well as show up some of the more humorous coincidences.

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