Telegram style, telegraph style, or telegraphic style 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

Telecommunication

Telecommunication is the transmission of information over significant distances to communicate. In earlier times, telecommunications involved the use of visual signals, such as beacons, smoke signals, semaphore telegraphs, signal flags, and optical heliographs, or audio messages via coded...

 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

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...

 style, over submarine communications cable

Submarine communications cable

A submarine communications cable is a cable laid on the sea bed between land-based stations to carry telecommunication signals across stretches of ocean....

s. 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

Full stop

A full stop is the punctuation mark commonly placed at the end of sentences. In American English, the term used for this punctuation is period. In the 21st century, it is often also called a dot by young people...

 character.
Example:

eg t-gram style stop

Example

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

Antecedents

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

Charles James Napier

General Sir Charles James Napier, GCB , was a general of the British Empire and the British Army's Commander-in-Chief in India, notable for conquering the Sindh Province in what is now Pakistan.- His genealogy :...

 on his having conquered the Indian province of Sindh

Sindh

Sindh historically referred to as Ba'ab-ul-Islam , is one of the four provinces of Pakistan and historically is home to the Sindhi people. It is also locally known as the "Mehran". Though Muslims form the largest religious group in Sindh, a good number of Christians, Zoroastrians and Hindus can...

 is legendary, consisting of the single word peccavi, Latin for "I have sinned", as used in the confessional.

Telegraphic coded expressions

Through the history of telegraphy, very many dictionaries of telegraphese, codes

Commercial code (communications)

In telecommunication, a commercial code is a code once used to save on cablegram costs . Telegraph companies have always charged based on the length of the message sent—and this has not changed since the 19th Century...

 or cipher

Cipher

In cryptography, a cipher is an algorithm for performing encryption or decryption — a series of well-defined steps that can be followed as a procedure. An alternative, less common term is encipherment. In non-technical usage, a “cipher” is the same thing as a “code”; however, the concepts...

s 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

Bandwidth (computing)

In computer networking and computer science, bandwidth, network bandwidth, data bandwidth, or digital bandwidth is a measure of available or consumed data communication resources expressed in bits/second or multiples of it .Note that in textbooks on wireless communications, modem data transmission,...

 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:

• Emolument - Think you had better not wait
• Emotion - Think you had better wait until -
• Emotional - Think you had better wait and sail -
• Empaled - Think well of party mentioned
• Empanel - This is a matter of great importance.

and from The A.B.C. Universal Commercial Electric Telegraphic Code

• Nalezing - Do only what is absolutely necessary
• Nalime - Will only do what is absolutely necessary
• Nallary - It is not absolutely necessary, but it would be an advantage
• Naloopen - It is not absolutely necessary, but well worth the outlay

Other languages

In Japanese, telegrams are printed using the katakana

Katakana

is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji, and in some cases the Latin alphabet . The word katakana means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana scripts are derived from components of more complex kanji. Each kana represents one mora...

 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

Twitter

Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...

. On telegrams, space was at a premium—economically speaking—and abbreviations were used as a matter of necessity.