This involves taking calls from customers who ring up for a chat to the operator's premium rate numbers, they are routed through to your home telephone.

The chat line company charges customers for calling a premium rate 'hotline' number and pays the chat line operator an hourly rate for the time spent chatting.

With the popularity and rise in use of online text-based communications came the emergence of a new texting language, tailored to the immediacy and compactness of these new communication media.

Today, text and chat abbreviations are used in Facebook, Twitter, instant messaging, email, Internet and online gaming services, chat rooms, discussion boards and mobile phone text messaging (SMS).

A good chunk of communication is knowing when it is and isn’t your turn to speak (another chunk is vocal nuance, which is partly addressed by emoticons); on a half-duplex line (where only one person can speak at a time) like a walkie-talkie, you really do have to say “over” to make sure your partner doesn’t miss anything.

While it does seem incredible that there are To keep our chat guide user-friendly for all ages, some inappropriate words have been edited to include an alternate meaning.

These words are marked with * around the word which has been switched (e.g. To navigate this lengthy guide, you can scroll through our chat abbreviations list or go directly to a specific number or letter using the following links: The world's first text message was sent from a computer to a cellphone by British engineer, Neil Papworth on December 03, 1992.

Do you feel paranoid when your friend appears to be typing for ages but the message you finally receive is only “ha ha”?

Do you hate knowing that your “friend” is The first professional software project I worked on was Microsoft’s instant messenger client, saddled with the unwieldy name “MSN Messenger Service”—chosen by the same marketing experts that gave us Zune, Microsoft Bob, and . It shipped back in 1999 after a few years of development.