Telegram style, telegraph style, telegraphic style, or telegraphese is a clipped way of writing which abbreviates words and packs information into the smallest possible number of words or characters. It originated in the

telegraph Telegraphy is the long-distance transmission of messages where the sender uses symbolic codes, known to the recipient, rather than a physical exchange of an object bearing the message. Thus flag semaphore is a method of telegraphy, whereas ...

age when telecommunication consisted only of short messages transmitted by hand over the telegraph wire. The telegraph companies charged for their service by the number of words in a message, with a maximum of 15 characters per word for a plain-language

telegram Telegraphy is the long-distance transmission of messages where the sender uses symbolic codes, known to the recipient, rather than a physical exchange of an object bearing the message. Thus flag semaphore is a method of telegraphy, whereas ...

, and 10 per word for one written in code. The style developed to minimize costs but still convey the message clearly and unambiguously. The related term ''cablese'' describes the style of press messages sent uncoded but in a highly condensed style over

submarine communications cable A submarine communications cable is a cable laid on the sea bed between land-based stations to carry telecommunication signals across stretches of ocean and sea. The first submarine communications cables laid beginning in the 1850s carried tel ...

s. In the U.S. Foreign Service, cablese referred to condensed telegraphic messaging that made heavy use of abbreviations and avoided use of definite or indefinite articles, punctuation, and other words unnecessary for comprehension of the message.

Antecedents

Before the telegraph age military dispatches from overseas were made by letters transported by rapid sailing ships. Clarity and concision were often considered important in such correspondence. An apocryphal story about the briefest correspondence in history has a writer (variously identified as

Victor Hugo Victor-Marie Hugo (; 26 February 1802 – 22 May 1885) was a French Romantic writer and politician. During a literary career that spanned more than sixty years, he wrote in a variety of genres and forms. He is considered to be one of the great ...

Oscar Wilde Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 185430 November 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is ...

) inquiring about the sales of his new book by sending the message "?" to his publisher, and receiving "!" in reply.

Telegraphic coded expressions

Through the history of telegraphy, very many dictionaries of telegraphese, codes or

cipher In cryptography, a cipher (or cypher) is an algorithm for performing encryption or decryption—a series of well-defined steps that can be followed as a procedure. An alternative, less common term is ''encipherment''. To encipher or encode ...

s were developed, each serving to minimise the number of characters or words which needed to be transmitted in order to impart a message; the drivers for this economy were, for telegraph operators, the resource cost and limited

bandwidth Bandwidth commonly refers to: * Bandwidth (signal processing) or ''analog bandwidth'', ''frequency bandwidth'', or ''radio bandwidth'', a measure of the width of a frequency range * Bandwidth (computing), the rate of data transfer, bit rate or thr ...

of the system; and for the consumer, the cost of sending messages. Examples of telegraphic coded expressions, taken from ''The Adams Cable Codex, Tenth Edition, 1896'' are: *Emolument – Think you had better not wait *Emotion – Think you had better wait until - *Emotional – Think you had better wait and sail - *Empaled – Think well of party mentioned *Empanel – This is a matter of great importance. Whereas examples from the ''A.B.C. Universal Commercial Electric Telegraphic Code'' of 1874 include: *Nalezing – Do only what is absolutely necessary *Nalime – Will only do what is absolutely necessary *Nallary – It is not absolutely necessary, but it would be an advantage *Naloopen – It is not absolutely necessary, but well worth the outlay

Other languages

In Japanese, telegrams are printed using the

katakana is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji). The word ''katakana'' means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived f ...

script, one of the few instances in which this script is used for entire sentences. In some ways, "telegram style" was the precursor to the modern language abbreviations employed in "texting" or the use of short message standard (SMS) services such as

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

. For telegrams, space was at a premium—economically speaking—and abbreviations were used as necessity. This motivation was revived for compressing information into the 160-character limit of a costly SMS before the advent of multi-message capabilities. Length constraints, and the initial handicap of having to enter each individual letter using multiple keypresses on a numeric pad, drove readoption of telegraphic style, and continued space limits and high per-message cost meant the practice persisted for some time after the introduction of built-in

predictive text Predictive text is an input technology used where one key or button represents many letters, such as on the numeric keypads of mobile phones and in accessibility technologies. Each key press results in a ''prediction'' rather than repeatedly ...

assistance despite it then needing more effort to write (and read).

Telegram length

The average length of a telegram in the 1900s in the US was 11.93 words; more than half of the messages were 10 words or fewer. According to another study, the mean length of the telegrams sent in the UK before 1950 was 14.6 words or 78.8 characters. For German telegrams, the mean length is 11.5 words or 72.4 characters. At the end of the 19th century the average length of a German telegram was calculated as 14.2 words.

Gallery

File:Telegram Hochiminh.jpg, File:WatsonLloydGeorgeTelegram.jpg, File:Astronomical Telegram John Ritchie.jpg,

References