Telegram style

An apocryphal story about the briefest correspondence in history has a writer (variously identified as Victor Hugo or Oscar Wilde) inquiring about the sales of his new book by sending the message "?"

[2] Through the history of telegraphy, very many dictionaries of telegraphese, codes or ciphers were developed, each serving to minimise the number of characters or words 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.

Universal Commercial Electric Telegraphic Code (1901)[4] all of which are English-like, but invented words: In some ways, telegram style was the precursor to the abbreviated language used in text messaging or short message standard (SMS) services such as Twitter, referred to as SMS language For telegrams, space was at a premium—economically speaking—and abbreviations were used as necessity.

Length constraints, and the initial handicap of having to enter each individual letter using multiple keypresses on a numeric pad, drove re-adoption of telegraphic style.

Continued space limits and high per-message cost meant the practice persisted for some time after the introduction of built-in predictive text assistance.