Textonyms
As mentioned above, the key sequence 4663 on a telephone keypad, provided with a linguistic database in English, will generally be disambiguated as the word "good". However, the same key sequence also corresponds to other words, such as "home", "gone", "hoof", "hood" and so on. Such confusions may lead to mistaken meaning even if all of the words are typed correctly and spelled correctly. For example, "Are you home?" could be rendered as "Are you good?" This fact can lead to misunderstandings. There is at least one reported case of a man stabbed to death in a fight caused by a text message rendered incorrectly by predictive text software. Additionally, "selected" and "rejected" are typed using the same keys, which can lead to texts taking on the opposite of the intended meaning.
Words produced by the same combination of keypresses may be referred to as "textonyms" (or "txtonyms") or "T9onyms" (pronounced "tynonyms"), though the phenomenon has nothing to do specifically with T9 per se and occurs in other systems.
Reportedly, textonyms may be adopted in regular speech; for example, the use of the word "book" to mean "cool" since book is debatably considered more frequent than "cool" by some predictive text systems.
Probably the most well-known example of such adoption is that arising from the key sequence "24824". This sequence corresponds to the very common English word "bitch", but some widely-used predictive text software instead disambiguates it as "chubi", which is not an English word at all, and while it does have a variety of entirely unrelated meanings in other languages these uses are largely unknown to English speakers. This bizarre substitution has resulted in "chubi" entering colloquial English usage as a synonym for "bitch".
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