On 14 May 2021 at 13:50:14 BST, ""NY"" wrote:

"Theo" wrote in message
...
In uk.telecom.mobile Pamela wrote:
A web site sends you 6-digit number to your phone to check your ID. Do
you memorise this by saying to yourself: 12-34-56 or 123-456?

It's a genuine question to see what number span people are using to
remember random numbers.

It depends on the structure of the number. eg:

55-67-99
132-231
1000-44
9-88888
27-288-9

Yes, if the number is already separated by hyphens/spaces, those are the
chunks that I try to memorise.

Apparently when the GPO started issuing phone numbers that were longer than
a couple of digits, they did some research and found that people could
remember chunks of either 2 or 3 digits, but a 4-digit chunk was harder to
remember.

I'm not sure why the UK read a chunk as a stream of digits (one-two-seven
[pause] three-four-one) whereas European countries assign tens-and-units
significance to pairs of digits (twelve [pause] seventy-three [pause]
forty-one).

snip

My satnav does that to three and four digit road numbers. I must admit I
thought it must be an Americanism.

--
Roger Hayter