1-800-

vtk

1-800-xxx-yyyy
888-xxx-yyyy
877-xxx-yyyy
866-xxx-yyyy
855-xxx-yyyy
844-xxx-yyyy

Why in advertising is the long distance prefix "1" typically included with toll-free numbers beginning with 800, but typically omitted from those with other "area codes"? They're all dialed the same...

Also, why are toll-free numbers not usually written in the traditional format (xxx) yyy-zzzz? I mean, I think I remember seeing 1 (800) xxx-yyyy a lot when I was a kid, but that's gone away (yet the 1 remains).

Tatterhood

I feel like (in Canada) I see 1-866- and so forth most of the time?

Princess Alice

These are the kind of things that always bothered me too.

glennmagusharvey

I've heard "1-888" before, as well as "800" by itself.

The most memorable example of the latter is probably this: https://heapershangout.com/index.php?p=/discussion/8622/eight-hundred-five-eight-eight-two-three-hundred-empire/p1

lee4hmz

In the old days, phone switches were stupid and would assume the "800" was a local exchange if you didn't dial a 1 before it. You'd get a "This call could not be completed as dialed" message. This hasn't been the case for a good 20 years now (when 10-digit dialing started becoming mandatory in a lot of places), but people expect the 1- there because it sounds "naked" without it.

888 and the other WATS area codes came out much later (I think 888 came out in the late 1980s), so it's not as odd to not hear 1- before them.

Princess Alice

Wow, I love it when there's an actual satisfying answer for a question like this.

Bee

My old workplace's phones would still fuck up if you didn't dial 9 to get out of intranet and 1 to go long distance.  It was simultaneously too new to think you were automatically on normal phone lines, and too old to tell the difference between local and long.

vtk

lee4hmz said:

In the old days, phone switches were stupid and would assume the "800" was a local exchange if you didn't dial a 1 before it. You'd get a "This call could not be completed as dialed" message.

I thought they went by the second digit: if a 0 or 1 then it's an area code, otherwise it's a local exchange. Of course, that must have changed decades ago when they started adding area codes with other middle digits. But either way, I'm pretty sure the leading 1 was strictly a signifier of long distance, which didn't correlate exactly with whether you were dialing a different area code.

lee4hmz

Pretty much everything regarding the old Bell way of doing things, which had a lot of workarounds to accommodate old stepping and crossbar switches, went out the window once more places had 5ESSes and DMS-100s (which could be programmed to do just about anything you wanted). 

You're right about the middle digit, though I've noticed that even now some exchanges will say "you must first dial a 1" before certain 10-digit numbers...