hakspek
:hakspek: /hak'speek/ n. A shorthand method of spelling found on many
British academic bulletin boards and talker system
. Syllables and
whole words in a sentence are replaced by single ASCII characters the
names of which are phonetically similar or equivalent, while multiple
letters are usually dropped. Hence, `for' becomes `4'; `two', `too', and
`to' become `2'; `ck' becomes `k'. "Before I see you tomorrow" becomes
"b4 i c u 2moro". First appeared in London about 1986, and was probably
caused by the slowness of available talker systems, which operated on
archaic machines with outdated operating systems and no standard methods
of communication.
Hakspek almost diappeared after the great bandwidth explosion of the
early 1990s, as fast Internet links wiped out the old-style talker
systems. However, it has enjoyed a revival in another medium - the Short
Message Service (SMS) associated with GSM cellphones. SMS sends are
limited to a maximum of 160 characters, and typing on a cellphone keypad
is difficult and slow anyway. There are now even published paper
dictionaries for SMS users to help them do hakspek-to-English and
vice-versa.
See also talk mode
Jargon File Version 4.3.1, 29 JUN 2001 =
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