Novorolsky

I have an old phone.  I've had it for around 5 or 6 years and somehow it's still in very good shape.  I've kind of been waiting for my phone to die so that I would be forced to upgrade, however it appears that it's hardy enough to last any period of time and so I've decided I will likely upgrade very soon.  With that back story behind us, now let's get on to the main purpose of this post.

Since my phone is quite old and the screen is quite small I don't have a newfangled touch screen keyboard.  Instead I have to use a standard telephone keypad where each number corresponds to three or four letters.  This means that when typing text messages I make use of the predictive text feature that helps to automatically select words based on the numbers I enter and can guess the completed word after only entering the first few letters.

In general this actually works quite well and often I only have to press one button per letter for each word.  More uncommon words, some names and obscure or anything outside of a dictionary is much more difficult to type and is a more manual process one letter at a time.  Sometimes the predictions are unexpected, for example when I was attempting to type the word "novocaine" it predicted "novorolsky"...

What also can be annoying is when two or more words are represented by the same sequence of numbers like home and good (4663).  When I was searching to find out the significance of novorolsky I discovered this forum thread that happens to be associated with one of my favourite web comics.  Someone suggests the term homonums for words like this and then it's discovered that wikipedia already has an article about textonyms!  Regardless, I'm likely switching to a smart phone soon so I won't have to deal with this problem anymore.