telnet client hostname/IP mapping

I am working in a lab where there is no name service for all the machines in the test bed. I want to save a mapping of hostnames to IP address so I can type telnet <single wordhostname> and it will take me to a defined IP address.

I suppose I could create an alias or something but is there a telnet client file that I can contains this information? perhaps similar to ~/.ssh/config

Clues please?