hakspek

/hakspeek/ , n. A shorthand method of spelling found on many British
academic bulletin boards and talker system s. Syllables and whole words in a
sentence are replaced by single ASCII characters the names of which are
phonetically similar or equivalent, while multiple letters are usually
dropped. Hence, for becomes 4 ; two , too , and to become 2 ; ck becomes k.
Before I see you tomorrow becomes b4 i c u 2moro. First appeared in London
about 1986, and was probably caused by the slowness of available talker
systems, which operated on archaic machines with outdated operating systems
and no standard methods of communication. Hakspek almost disappeared after
the great bandwidth explosion of the early 1990s, as fast Internet links
wiped out the old-style talker systems. However, it has enjoyed a revival in
another medium the Short Message Service (SMS) associated with GSM
cellphones. SMS sends are limited to a maximum of 160 characters, and typing
on a cellphone keypad is difficult and slow anyway. There are now even
published paper dictionaries for SMS users to help them do
hakspek-to-English and vice-versa. See also talk mode.

