Dials outside Canada, the United States, and large cities in Britain (before all-figure dialling) usually did not bear alphabetic characters or an indication of the word "operator" in addition to numbers. Alphabetic designation of exchanges with Cyrillic letters (А, Б, В, Г, Д, Е, Ж, И, К, Л for each of the digits from 1 through 0 respectively) was also used for a short period in the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s, but by the next decade this practice was largely discontinued.