When Did We Drop Parentheses Around Area Codes?

When I grew up, everyone knew their telephone area codes but hardly ever used them. Thanks to technology, those days are long gone.

I’m actually old enough to remember rotary dial telephones. The push button household phones most of you grew up with were rolling out in the 1960s. But I was in elementary school before my parents switched to the push-button variety. My grandmother’s home still had rotary dial phone after that. But whether we dialed or pushed our way through the phone numbers, we didn’t think much about area codes.

Back then, just as now, area codes were important. But they weren’t necessary at all when you dialed a phone number within your same area.

As the population increased, but more importantly, as technology improved, we faced a problem. We went from every home having a telephone to households having a landline and a car phone. At the same time, businesses, which often had multiple lines to begin with, started adding fax machines.

Available telephone numbers began running out. But since the revolution of cell phones — and now smartphones — it seems nearly everyone has their own line.

Here’s an interesting fact: Back n 1947, most states had a single area code to cover everyone.

California had three area codes. My home state of South Carolina, for example, had just one: the 803 area code. Georgia had 404, the code we now associate with with the Atlanta area. North Carolina had 704, which is now just for the Charlotte area.

South Carolina’s 803 now covers mostly the Columbia area and the central part of the state. But it took our state a while to add more codes. It wasn’t until 1995 that the Greenville-Spartanburg area — the “Upstate” — moved to the 864 code. Three years later, the coastal parts of the state, from Charleston to Myrtle Beach, moved to the 843 code.

We now have two additional codes: 839 joined 803 for the Midlands and new numbers in the Lowcountry and Grand Strand areas get an 854 code when there’s no longer an 843 number available.

But adding all of those numbers and codes caused a problem: We now had situations in which the seven digits after an area code might be identical to a different number in another state. (Or, at least, we faced that possibility as becoming inevitable.)

That’s when telephone companies began using 10-digit dialing. That meant to call up your neighbor next door, you had to dial the area code and the seven-digit number, as if you were calling several states away.

Parentheses around area codes fell out of favor…but did you know?

At some point, as we approached 10-digit dialing, another change began.

In the old days, we’d place the area code of a telephone number in parentheses:

(803) 555-1234

Yes, the area code was there, but it wasn’t so important. We only dialed the seven digits that came before it. And yes, the phone number above is a fictional one; don’t waste your time dialing.

At some point — several years ago — the rule about phone numbers changed. The new rule now specified that parentheses were no longer appropriate. So that same number was now written with just hyphens between code and prefix and between prefix and number:

803-555-1234

I try to keep up-to-date when it comes to the Associated Press Stylebook since my real job requires me to observe AP Style. That’s a style adopted by newsrooms around the world to make sharing their content among members easier.

The oldest Associated Press Stylebook I have at home is the 2019 edition. That one lists the no-parentheses rule about telephone numbers.

I was able to find the year AP Style editors made the change at the blog of retired University of South Carolina Professor Doug Fisher: 2006. As Fisher put it at the time, with the move, AP “enters the modern era.”

It’s certainly not the first time AP Style was accused of not keeping up with the times. It certainly won’t be the last.

Somehow, I missed the rule when it changed, so for years, I was still using the parentheses around the area code. I learned of the change several years ago, but certainly after 2015.

Many college and business style guides echo the rule: Hyphens only in telephone numbers, no parentheses.

So if you’re still writing a phone number with a parenthesis on either side of the area code, you’re even slower to catch up to the rule than I am. It’s time to get with it! That area code is no longer parenthetical: Without it, your call, as the recording might say, “cannot be completed as dialed!”