PhoneWords Help

PhoneWords replaces digits in a phone number with letters to form words (and residual digits). PhoneWords knows about 500,000 words.

Type a phone number into the edit box, press the return key or click the Go button, and a list of words/phrases made from the letters will appear. The edit box will accept up to 10 digits only.

When PhoneWords is processing a request the Go button's label will change to Stop. Clicking Stop will stop the search. Sometimes Stop is slow to react. The Stop button is disabled and changes to Stopping after it is clicked. It stays disabled until Go is shown again.

The Minimum Word Length spinner sets the minimum length of words considered to prevent very short words from cluttering the list.

The Extra Letters spinner sets how many letters to add to the end of the phone number when seaarching for words. For instance, 1-800-CALL-VISA has eight letters for a phone number that has only 7 digits after the area code. It has 1 extra letter. Extra Letters can be set to 0, 1 or 2. When "dialed" the extra letters are ignored by the phone system.

Using two extra letters slows PhoneWords a lot. A typical update time of 30 seconds is not unusual for 2 letters with the regular dictionary, and with the large dictionary can be one minute or longer.

Checking the Words Only box will prevent digits 2 through 9 from appearing in PhoneWords' output. This will likely reduce the number of results, perhaps to none. If none is found then try using the large dictionary.

Checking the Use Large Dictionary checkbox will cause PhoneWords to use a 499,435-word dictionary. This may result in many items in the list, possibly making it hard to find the item you want. The default Small Dictionary has 121,509 words.

Selecting a Font

To select a font for PhoneWords to use, click menu item Edit→Change Font... and select an application-wide font family, style, weight and point size. Your selection will be retained across PhoneWords runs.

Log File

If an error occurs it is logged in file
"/Users/<your name>/PhoneWords.log".

Uninstalling PhoneWords

To uninstall PhoneWords click menu item Help→Uninstall PhoneWords... and answer two questions.

License

PhoneWords, by Ron Charlton, is protected by copyright under the GNU GPL, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html. PySide software is distributed under the GNU GPL as well as Riverbank Commercial License: see https://riverbankcomputing.com/software/pyqt/intro; Python software is distributed under a license detailed at https://docs.python.org/3/license.html.

PhoneWords was built with Python, PySide6 and Python's Nuitka compiler. You may copy and distribute PhoneWords as per the GPL, PySide and Python licenses.