I remember having read a long and detailed article somewhere about the practice of writing out certain words and phrases using nothing but numbers (893 for ヤクザ, 39 for サンキュー, etc.), as well as "transcribing" longer phrases with a string of numbers as a riddle, challenging others to figure out what phrase the numbers stand for. The article had lots of examples of such usage, as well as a table demonstrating the correspondence between individual numbers and syllables/morae they may replace. I'm 95% certain that the article in question was on the English Wikipedia. The problem is I can't find it anywhere - the Japanese numerals article neither mentions this practice nor links to an article about it, and I've tried searching for it by typing in various possible keywords, both on Wikipedia and on Google, to no avail. Does anybody know the proper term for this, in Japanese or in English? Or maybe someone here knows of any articles about it? Any help would be appreciated.

it's called goro
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%AA%9E%E...F%E3%81%9B
its really cool since u can remember facts easily with goro ie square rooot of something or the year that some japanese history event took place

It's such a great benefit from learning japanese.

howtwosavealif3 Wrote:it's called goro
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%AA%9E%E...F%E3%81%9B
its really cool since u can remember facts easily with goro ie square rooot of something or the year that some japanese history event took place

It's such a great benefit from learning japanese.

And what do you know - that article links to the exact article from the English Wikipedia I was thinking of! It's not as long and detailed as I remembered it being, but the table is there. I did think of the word "pun" when searching for it, but "wordplay" never occurred to me for some reason. 39!

It's missing all the best ones!
4545454545454545454545454545 (88888)

[s0apgun]

A lot of car / drift shops use this stuff for their names. My all time favorite is 326 Power. The owners name is Mitsuru Haruguchi and its read as Mitsuru Power. (326 = みつる）I think for this one the numbers look like the hiragana, not the pronunciation so it can be done a couple different ways.

s0apgun Wrote:A lot of car / drift shops use this stuff for their names. My all time favorite is 326 Power. The owners name is Mitsuru Haruguchi and its read as Mitsuru Power. (326 = みつる）I think for this one the numbers look like the hiragana, not the pronunciation so it can be done a couple different ways.

Well, it's a bit of both: 3 is み as in みっつ, 2 is つ as in ツー (two), and for 6 る is only a short step away from ろ as in ろく.

Brilliant! I didn't realize there were a lot of these. The only ones I know were 39 and 1492 -- いしぐに。