Phillips Code


The Phillips Code is a brevity code created in 1879 by Walter P. Phillips for the rapid transmission of press reports by telegraph. It defined hundreds of abbreviations and initialisms for commonly used words that news authors and copy desk staff would commonly use. There were subcodes for commodities and stocks called the Market Code, a Baseball Supplement, and single-letter codes for Option Months. The last official edition was published in 1925, but there was also a Market supplement last published in 1909 that was separate.
The code consists of a dictionary of common words or phrases and their associated abbreviations. Extremely common terms are represented by a single letter ; those less frequently used gain successively longer abbreviations.
Later, The Evans Basic English Code expanded the 1,760 abbreviations in the Phillips Code to 3,848 abbreviations

Examples of use

Using the Phillips Code, a message could be composed and sent as this ten-word telegram:
ABBG LG WORDS CAN SAVE XB AMTS MON AVOG FAPIB.
Whereupon receipt by the news desk, it would be expanded to this:
Abbreviating long words can save exorbitant amounts of money, avoiding filing a petition in bankruptcy.
Famously, the Kansas City Star published the following code in 1910:
“T trl o HKT ft mu o SW on Mu roof garden, nw in pg...”
Which the news desk should have transcribed as the following before sending it to the typesetter:
“The trial of Harry K Thaw for the murder of Stanford White on the Madison Square Roof Garden, now in progress...”

Notable codes

The terms POTUS and SCOTUS originated in the code. SCOTUS appeared in the very first edition of 1879 and POTUS was in use by 1895, and was officially included in the 1923 edition. These abbreviations entered common parlance when news gathering services, in particular, the Associated Press, adopted the terminology.
Telegraph operators would often interleave Phillips Code with numeric wire signals that had been developed during the American Civil War era, such as the 92 Code. These codes were used by railroad telegraphers to indicate logistics instructions and they proved to be useful when describing an article's priority or confirming its transmission and receipt. This meta-data would occasionally appear in print when typesetters included the codes in newspapers, especially the code for "No more - the end", abbreviated as "- 30 -" on a typewriter.

Excerpts of the codes

Editions