Zonino!

Zonino

Reading about textonyms, I learned that if you type ‘Woohoo’ (i.e. 966466) on a numeric keypad using the T9 input system, the predictive text algorithm produces ‘Zonino’. I can’t figure out how this word found its way into the T9 dictionary - it isn’t an English dictionary word, and while it seems to be a surname, it’s pretty rare.

There’s some anecdotal evidence that this and other automatic word substitutions have escaped into the wild as synonyms of the intended words.

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