I always wonder how much lawyers in the US pay for their phone numbers... 444-4444 or 888-8888 and so on. I would guess it's even more?

Sometimes the numbers are forwarded to different numbers based on user area code or other tactics to infer caller location.

Ie: they’re licensed to different parties in different locales.

I see bus ads for an accident lawyer in California with the phone number (800) 800-0000. I wonder if that phone number is more valuable than 888-8888.

Probably pretty similar in California advertising to non-Chinese. To Chinese, 8 is a lucky number, so more 8s would be better.

Or 1800-flowers/glasses etc.

How do you input a number like that?

On many (American) phone keypads, 1 is blank, 2 is A, or B, or C, 3 is DEF, 4 is GHI, 5 is JKL, 6 is MNO, 7 is PQRS, 8 is TUV, and 9 is WXYZ.

So for FLOWERS you'd see that the F is on 3, L is on 5, O is on 6, etc. to get 356-9377. Note that both R and S are on 7, they map to the same number, so different words are likely to all map to the same number, like "Roses" and "Ropes".

Companies sometimes use longer or shorter numbers: you might see a number written with left-padded numbers, like "1-800-1FLOWER", for which you'd dial 1-800-135-6937. You might also see longer words, like 1-800-ARRANGEMENTS..you could type in 1-800-277-2643 63687, but the extra letters would just go into the recipient's PBX (like dialing an extension) and get discarded.

I see. TIL and thank you!

A lot of phones come with the English alphabet on the 12 keys, three letters to a key. Similar to older phones that had a physical dialpad. You could then dial the "word" you want by looking at the number on which the correct letter is. That's one way these systems could work.

That's close, in the US it's 2-9 with 7 and 9 getting 4 letters for PQRS and WXYZ respectively.

Thank you!

Using the old timey keyboard layout[1] (a relic of pre-touchscreen phones)

So 1800-flowers would be 1800-3569377

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.161

So that's what the letters were for on phone keyboards.

The use for vanity numbers is a later development. Originally the three digit exchange "number" in North America was identified by a three letter code. On a phone with no dial you'd tell the operator the exchange codeword and the four digit number within the exchange if you didn't want to manually pulse the switchhook. For automatic switch dialed calls, the dial needed to also be marked for these letter codes so you didn't need to use a separate reference for the corresponding digit.

The most valueable number is still:

555-SHOE