Telegraphese is a style of writing in which unimportant words are omitted, and abbreviations and code words are used to compress the meaning of phrases into a small set of chartacters. Telegraphese arose out of the use of the telegraph, a device for transmitting electrical impulses used for communications, introduced from 1839 onwards.

Though the history of telegraphy, very many dictionaries of telegraphese, codes or ciphers were developed, each serving to minimise the number of characters 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 of the system; and for the consumer, the cost of sending messages.

Examples of telegraphese 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.

and from The A.B.C. Universal Commercial Electric Telegraphic Code

• 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

External links

• Telegraphic codes and message practice, 1870-1945