I am curious if anyone knows the word to describe the use of an Arabic numeral in place of a word (e.g. I went to the jungle 4 the fever but stayed for the elephants.). Is it simply called text speak or, as I imagine, is there an actual term for this?
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Thanks
Hi Eurus, and welcome to the forum!
I don't think that type of abbreviation (very popular in text messaging) would properly be called acrophony.
Using letters to represent words is, imho, somewhere between transliteration and phonemics. So maybe I'd coin the term transphonemics or even transphonics to describe this recent assault on the written word.
EDIT: I just Googled my suggested terms, and neither jibed with my intended meaning.
But then, we have several scholars in this forum who might suggest a more correct term derived from Latin or Greek.
The term I came up with is pictographic heterograph.
I'd say heterograph could stand on its own, and kinda' like it. That type of abbreviation isn't really pictographic, as are hieroglyphics, Blissymbolics, or iConji.
Thinking more about your original question, I also came up with hyper-abbreviation, and also simply non-standard abbreviation. It's such a new phenomenon, used heavily in texting and to a lesser extend in email, that there may be no "official" word for it yet. Of course, that never stops a true logophile from trying to come up with one.
 hi/(hyper)-abbreviations is a just description. Thanks for taking the time to think about it.