Now there’s a headline you don’t see every day.

I’ve had mobile phones for years but never butt-dialed or butt-texted anyone … until a couple of months ago, when I seemed to make up for lost time by sending off a series of messages and Line calls to one of my wife’s relatives. To make matters worse, this relative is in the States, where it was then after midnight.

Anyway, the messages start off in nonsense English and then switch mainly to nonsense Mandarin.

Most of the Chinese characters are isolated and have no semantic relationship to those around them. Predictably, most of the characters are for few simple sounds

• 凹 [āo] — concave
• 鞥 [ēng] — quite rare: leading rein (of a horse)

But there are a few instances of at least two characters working together:

• 偶爾 ǒu’ěr (“occasionally”)
• 怨偶 yuàn’ǒu (“unhappy couple”)
• 鱷魚 èyú (“crocodile”)

So just in case anyone has ever wondered what butt texting in Chinese characters looks like, here you go. People whose phones have different methods for inputting Chinese characters will likely see somewhat different results.

I took several screenshots and stitched them together in Photoshop.