The book provides a listing of condensed terms and codes used to shorten telegrams and save money.

The book was extremely popular amongst businesses in the 1930s.

[2] The Acme code consists of one hundred thousand five letter codes each intended to stand in for a phrase.

It was designed to be tolerant of transposition errors; the author claims that "no transposition of any two adjoining letters will make another word in the book".

However, as later discovered by J. Reeds, the code did not provide this level of error correction, containing at least eleven pairs of words differing only by the transposition of two letters.