The Secret Messages Inside Chinese URLs
Decoding 4008-517-517.com
龙腾网 http://www.ltaaa.com
An American friend living in Beijing once said she refused to communicate with anyone whose email address consisted of a string of numbers, such as 62718298454@163.com. This made sense to me at the time—why make email addresses as difficult to remember as phone numbers? But I soon realized that issuing a blanket ban on number-based communications would mean cutting off just about every single Chinese person I knew.龙腾网 http://www.ltaaa.com

In the U.S., you really only have to remember two long numbers, ever: Your phone number and your Social Security number. In China, you’re constantly barraged by digits: QQ numbers (QQ is China’s most popular chat service), email addresses, and even URLs. For example, the massive online retailer Jingdong Mall is at jd.com or, if that takes too long to type, 3.cn. Check out 4399.com to see one of China’s first and largest online gaming websites. Buy and sell used cars at 92.com. Want to purchase train tickets? It’s as easy as 12306.cn.

Why the preference for digits over letters? It mostly has to do with ease of memorization. To a native English-speaker, remembering a long string of digits might seem harder than memorizing a word. But that’s if you understand the word. For many Chinese, numbers are easier to remember than Latin characters. Sure, Chinese children learn the pinyin system that uses the Roman alphabet to spell out Mandarin words (for example, the word for “Internet,” 网络, is spelled wangluo in pinyin). And yes, Arabic numerals (1-2-3) are technically just as much a foreign import as the Roman alphabet (A-B-C). But most Chinese are more familiar with numbers than letters, especially those who didn’t go to college. To many, “Hotmail.com” might as well be Cyrillic.

The digits in a domain name usually aren’t random. The Internet company NetEase uses the web address 163.com—a throwback to the days of dial-up when Chinese Internet users had to enter 163 to get online. The phone companies China Telecom and China Unicom simply reappropriated their well-known customer service numbers as domain names, 10086.cn and 10010.cn, respectively.

Digits are even more convenient when you consider that the words for numbers are homophones for other words. The URL for the massive e-commerce site Alibaba, for example, is 1688.com, pronounced “yow-leeyoh-ba-ba”—close enough! Those digits can just as often have individual meanings. The video sharing site 6.cn works because the word for “six” is a near-homophone for the word “to stream.” The number five is pronounced wu, which sounds like wo, which means “I.” The number one is pronounced yao, which with a different tone means “want.” So the job-hunting site 51job.com sounds a lot like “I want a job.” Likewise, to order McDonalds’ delivery online, just go to 4008-517-517.com, the “517” of which sounds a bit like “I want to eat.” (An English equivalent might be the old radio jingle, “How many cookies did Andrew eat? Andrew 8-8000.”)

This kind of number-language has become an infinitely malleable shorthand among Chinese web users: 1 means “want,” 2 means “love,” 4 means “dead” or “world” or “is,” 5 means “I,” 7 means “wife” or “eat,” 8 means “get rich” or “not,” and 9 means “long time” or “alcohol.” The numbers 5201314, for example, mean 我爱你一生一世,or “I will love you forever”; 0748 means “go die”; and 687 means “I’m sorry.” (See here for more examples.) Chinese has plenty of other number-based slang, such as erbaiwu, or “250,” which means “idiot,” or “38,” pronounced sanba, which means “bitch.” And of course there’s the association of certain numbers with good or bad luck, and the subsequent demand for addresses and phone numbers with lots of 8s (“get rich”) and minimal 4s (“die”). Back in 2003, a Chinese airline paid $280,000 for the phone number 88888888.

Why don’t Chinese web addresses just use Mandarin characters? Because that’s a pain, too. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which sets the rules for web addresses globally, has periodically hyped the expansion of domain names to include non-Latinate scripts, but Chinese web sites have yet to take full advantage. Some devices require a special plug-in to type in Chinese URLs, and even then it takes longer to type or write out characters than to input a few digits. Plus, for web sites that want to expand internationally but don’t want to alienate foreign audiences with unfamiliar characters, numbers are a decent compromise.

Still, the numbers/letters divide is emblematic of the Internet’s built-in bias: Even more than two decades after its birth, it’s still a fundamentally American system. (Sorry, Tim Berners-Lee.) ICANN is an American non-profit corporation, though the U.S. recently agreed to hand it over to a “global multi-stakeholder community” in 2015. ASCII, the character-encoding scheme that was long used on most web pages, is short for the “American Standard Code for Information Interchange.” In 2012, the United States refused to sign an international telecommunications treaty, supported by both Russia and China, that would shift the Internet away from its current U.S.-centric form of governance. In other words, the structure of the Internet is a constant reminder of American digital hegemony, from WiFi standards to GPS. Even the “.cn” at the end of Chinese URLs comes from the English word for China, not the Chinese word for China. You can’t blame other countries for wanting to tell the American 250s to 0748.

<ignore_js_op style="word-wrap:break-word;color:#444444;font-family:tahoma, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:14px;line-height:21px;background-color:#ffffff;"></ignore_js_op>

有个住在北京的美国妞说过，她从不理会地址里带数字的电子邮件，例如62718298454@163.com。我(原文作者)听到她这么说的时候觉得她说的挺有道理——为什么要把电子邮箱地址搞成电话号码那么难记的数字？然而，禁掉了带数字的通讯方式，竟然切断了和所有我认识的中国人的联络。

在美国，真正需要记住的长号码只有两个：手机号和社保卡号。而在中国，你得记住QQ号、邮箱地址、甚至各个网站的地址。中国人喜欢用数字做域名，京东的原网站名为360buy.com，后来改为更简单的jd.com，要是你还觉得不好记，直接输入3.cn也可以。4399是中国最大的在线游戏网站，二手车网站是92.com，买火车票要去12306。

为什么中国人对数字如此偏爱？

这很大程度上和记忆方式有关。英语使用者记忆单词比记忆数字更简单，但是对许多中国人来说数字比拉丁字母更容易记忆。尽管中国儿童从小学习拼音系统，但是大多数人更熟悉的还是数字，特别是没有上过大学的人们。Hotmail.com这个域名对许多中国人来说就和难懂的古代斯拉夫字母一样看不懂。

中国网站网址中的数字不是随随便便乱选的。

数字所代表的含义各有不同，视频网站6.cn中6的中文发音接近“流”，数字5的发音接近“我”，数字1的发音接近“要”，51job.com的发音听上去很像“我要工作”。类似还有麦当劳的外卖网站4008-517-517.com，517在中文里发音很像“我要吃”。

数字语言有无穷变化，也成为了中国网站用户的速记法宝：1是要，2是爱，4是死/世/是，5是我，7是妻/吃，8是发/不，9是久/酒。5201314是我爱你一生一世，0748意思是“你去死吧”，687代表对不起，250是白痴，38是婊子。中国人还喜欢带很多8的手机号，同时最好不带4。

<ignore_js_op style="word-wrap:break-word;color:#444444;font-family:tahoma, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:14px;line-height:21px;background-color:#ffffff;">

</ignore_js_op>

为什么中国不干脆使用汉字作为网址？说起来都是痛。互联网名称与数字地址分配机构，简称ICANN是制定全球网址规则的机构。ICANN会定期宣传非拉丁字母本文域名的推广，但是许多中国网站还是没有完全利用这点。对于某些设备，输入汉字需要特殊设备，就算能够输入汉字，比起汉字输入，数字的输入耗时更少。再者，对于有全球视野的网站，他们不希望外国用户面对的是自己看不懂的汉字，而数字则是体面的让步。

数字/字母的发展方向可以看出根治于互联网的偏见：即便在互联网诞生20年后的今天，依然是一套美国系统。虽然美国最近同意在2015年时将ICANN交给一家全球多方利益相关机构打理，但目前ICANN还是是一家美国非营利团体。ASCII，大多数网站会用到的字母编码系统其实是美国信息互换标准代码(American Standard Code for Information Interchange)的缩写。2012年美国拒绝在有俄罗斯和中国支持的国际电信条约签字，因为这意味着将互联网的管理核心从美国移走。换句话说，从WiFi到GPS，互联网结构一直提醒着人们——美国依然掌握着互联网的数字霸权。

虽然中国有自己的顶级域名.cn，但.cn毕竟不是中文，那些想对美国人说250，或0748的国家，你也无从指责。

为什么中国网址偏好数字？