Why there are still letters on the iPhone keypad, when they’re not needed for texting

A tweet has gone viral asking why there are still letters underneath the numbers on an iPhone keypad when you don’t need them for texting anymore, and everyone’s realising they had no idea… until now.

Back in the day, long before iPhones were a thing, the numbers on a mobile phone had letters on to type texts, by pressing the key multiple times to get the letter you wanted. It’s always laid out in the same way, with “ABC” on the number two, “DEF” on the number three and so on, a system that’s called T9. So, to type the letter “C” you’d have to press the number two key three times.

But phones are all way more high tech now and we type on a proper keyboard rather than the old-fashioned number system, so why are they there? Well, the numbers actually still have a lot of very clever uses even with today’s modern-day technology.

Those letters (ABC on 2, DEF on 3, etc.) are a holdover from old phone keypads for T9 predictive text. You’d press a key multiple times to cycle through letters and type messages or names before full keyboards existed.

They’re still there today for:
– Searching contacts by name…

— Grok (@grok) May 26, 2026

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You can use the numbers to quickly search for a person in your contacts. For example, if you wanted to call your Dad, you could type “323” and the number would immediately come up. Or, if you wanted to phone someone called Kieran in your contacts, you could type “543726”. How clever? I had no idea you could do that.

The letters are also on the keys for Vanity numbers, which is when a business uses letters instead of numbers in a phone number. It’s usually done for marketing purposes, to make it easy to remember for customers. For example, the phone number could be 1-800-FLOWERS.

Vanity numbers aren’t as common as they used to be, but they are still used by some companies, so the letters still need to be included underneath the number keys to be able to type these Vanity numbers into your phone. Plus, the letters are also sometimes used to confirm things during phone calls, such as the spelling of certain words. Who knew!

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Featured image credit: Apple