Telegram style, telegraph style, telegraphic style or telegraphese[1] describes a clipped way of writing that attempts to abbreviate words and pack as much information into the shortest possible number of words and or characters.
It originated in the telegraph age when telecommunication consisted only of short messages transmitted by hand over the telegraph wire. The telegraph companies charged for their service by the number of words in a message. The style developed to minimize costs but still convey the message clearly and unambiguously.
Related but distinct, is the historical practice of using abbreviations and code words to compress the meaning of phrases into a small set of characters for ease of transmission over a telegraph, a device for transmitting electrical impulses used for communications, introduced from 1839 onwards. The related term cablese describes the style of press messages sent uncoded, but in a highly condensed, Hemingwayesque style, over submarine communications cables. In the U.S. Foreign Service, before the advent of broadband telecommunications, cablese referred to condensed telegraphic messaging that made heavy use of abbreviations and avoided use of definite or indefinite articles, punctuation, and other words unnecessary for comprehension of the message.
A characteristic is the use of the word STOP for a full stop character. Example:
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Orville Wright's telegram of December 17th 1904 about the first powered flight (see image).
success four flights thursday morning all against twenty one mile wind started from level with engine power alone average speed through air thirty one miles longest 57 seconds inform Press home Christmas . Orevelle Wright
Before the telegraph age military despatches from overseas were made by letters transported by rapid sailing ships. Clarity and concision were always important in such correspondence, military men having little liking for time-consuming reading, yet the degree of concision, and humour, attained in the 1843 despatch of General Charles James Napier on his having conquered the Indian province of Sindh is legendary, consisting of the single word peccavi, Latin for "I have sinned", as used in the confessional.
Through the history of telegraphy, very many dictionaries of telegraphese, codes or ciphers were developed, each serving to minimise the number of characters which needed to be transmitted in order to impart a message; the drivers for this economy were, for telegraph operators, the resource cost and limited bandwidth of the system; and for the consumer, the cost of sending messages.
Examples of telegraphic coded expressions, taken from The Adams Cable Codex, Tenth Edition, 1896 are:
and from The A.B.C. Universal Commercial Electric Telegraphic Code
In Japanese, telegrams are printed using the katakana script, one of the few instances in which this script is used for entire sentences.
In some ways, "telegram style" was the precursor to the modern language abbreviations employed in "texting" or the use of short message standard (SMS) services such as Twitter. On telegrams, space was at a premium—economically speaking—and abbreviations were used as a matter of necessity.