"Peter Able" wrote in message
...
I notice on the continent people often quote the digits of a phone
number in pairs, whereas the UK tends to quote a number in groups of
three digits.

I originally put it down to how their phone company laid out the
digits but I think it's more widespread than that.

Personally, I kind of visualise and alomst recognise the SIGHT of
digit-pairs but I remember digit-triplets mainly by their SOUND.

That sounds a bit synaethesic. I'm not sure I've ever been aware that I've
remembered a phone number by what the groups of digits sound like. I imagine
the sight of the digits on the page. But everyone has their own method of
remembering things, and no method is better or worse than another, as long
as it works and is quick to encode/decode. I understand that a way of
remembering a sequence of objects so you can replay them in the right order
is to devise a "story" in which all the objects appear. But when I've tried
it, it takes me so long to encode them into the story and then to decode
them later on, that it doesn't work for me.

As already said, it may be structurally easier to work in digit pairs or
triplets - or a mixture.

Surely the only rule is that it is discourteous to confirm back a number
NOT in the format first spoken. E.g. 23 93 73 confirmed back as 239 373
!

I'm rather malicious. If someone quotes a phone number to me in groups of
two, especially if those groups are given tens-and-units significance
("twenty-three forty-five" as opposed to "two three [pause] four five" I
tend to read it back as digits in groups of three, because that's what I was
*expecting* to hear.