I always felt like there should be a way to read numbers like we read words and have them make sense and easy to remember. Every now and then, when I had some free time, I’d try to come with a method to do so.
I tried assigning a consonant and a vowel to each number 0-9. Zero would be ‘ze’, One would be ‘On’, Two would be ‘to’, Three ‘te’, Four ‘fo’, Five ‘fi’, Six ‘si’, Seven ‘se’, Eights ‘eg’ and Nine ‘ni’. So a number such as 723 would be ‘setote’ which makes no sense whatsoever.
Then I wrote the numbers in block for and concatenated them together so for example, 770 would be ‘TO’ which seemed to be promising but nine numbers taken three at a time comes to 504 different permutations, most of which make no sense.
Then I decided to look at the numbers upside down and I noticed something interesting. All the numbers – except for 8 – are a letter when upside down. 0 is ‘O’, 1 is ‘I’, 2 is ‘Z’, 3 is ‘E’, 4 (written in goalpost style) is ‘h’, 5 is ‘S’, 6 is ‘g’, 7 is ‘L’ and 9 is ‘b’. So I tried to make words out of the letters for each number. For example, 723 upside down would be EZL which doesn’t make sense. Then I replaced ‘Z’ for 2 with other letters because ‘Z’ is used so infrequently but still didn’t make much sense.
Then I tried using the letter for each number as the first letter in a word. For example, 723 would be three words, the first one beginning with ‘L’, the second with ‘W’ ( I chose ‘W’ for 2 instead of ‘Z’) and the third with ‘E’. Maybe ‘Last Weeks Event’ or ‘Lazy Won’t Exercise’ both of which represent the number 723 and they make some contextual sense. But in order to make it more meaningful, I also put auxiliary words where needed to make the phrase more contextual. An auxiliary word is any word that begins with a letter that doesn’t represent a number. So: c, d, f, j, k, m, n, p, q, r, t, u, v, x, y, z. Note: I chose ‘a’ to represent 8.
For example: ‘Landlord with excellent seaside dwelling, excellent WiFi, excellent garage, taking offers’ is the sentence for the phone number on a for sale banner of an apartment across from mine at the beach. Decoding it resolves to the number: 723 532 360. ‘Dwelling’ and ‘Taking’ are auxiliary words used to give the sentence contextual meaning. When I think of the apartment for sale across from mine, I think of ‘Landlord’, ‘Dwelling’, ‘Seaside’ etc. so it makes it easy to remember the sentence, then I can just decode it and I have the number.
‘Let me explain something, good beer barley prevents a lousy beer’ is the sentence for the number on an advert for a bar. The number is: 735 699 879 with auxiliary words ‘me’ and ‘prevents’ to clarify the context. I created that encoding weeks ago and I still remember it. You can substitute any letters you want for 2 and 8 but ensure you use the same ones all the time or it will mix up the numbers. The more you employ this method the easier it becomes and the encoding remains with you for a long time.