Textonyms

My former colleague, Alec Muffet has written in his blog about Qwertonyms, words which are different, but use the same keys in predictive text mode on a mobile phone, eg 'home' and 'good'.

I first heard about them a few years ago. Some friends texted to say they were coming over, and I replied with "I'll open the post", which confused them. I meant port

When I explained my puzzling reply, my friend told me that Stephen Fry had spoken about them. His nephew and his friends had started using the word 'book' instead of 'cool', because when they typed 'cool' in the phone 'book' was the first entry in the list. Book became their slang for cool not just in text but in speech as well.

The word textonyms, rather than qwertonyms, has been used to describe these.

The Chambers Dictionary website has an entry for textonym in its wordwatch section - http://www.chambersharrap.co.uk/chambers/features/wordwatch/textonym.shtml