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This is partly inspired by the recent question on words with both types of kana.

I am referring to words such as:

39=さんきゅう=Thank you
4649-> よろしく、46 in internet slang
5963-> ご苦労さん

I know these are often used in telephone numbers (so for example a florist would try to get a telephone number containing 8787, 花花)

It is part of modern vocabulary not something covered in text books. I found the following links but I have not found a frequency list.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_wordplay

http://www.tofugu.com/2011/08/30/goroawase-japanese-numbers-wordplay/#disqus_thread

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This may serve as an interesting read. It seems to be a list of the license plate numbers that people wanted, sorted in order of frequency. Unfortunately, frequency lists are very difficult to find because they require large amounts of information to be accurate and few people have the resources to gather and subsequently analyze that information.

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  • Thanks - Now I think about it probaby isn't the easiest freq list to compile but this is great start. Wonder if anyone has seen a similar list for phone numbers too? (I realize that tel#s are unique but so are car # plates. If that is possible then, on the basis tel numbers can be requested, there may be some list of commonly requested combinations?)
    – Tim
    Apr 3, 2014 at 5:00

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