For the HTML tag, see HTML element .
An abbreviation is a shortened form of a word or phrase. Usually, but not always, it consists
of a letter or group of letters taken from the word or phrase. For example, the word
abbreviation can itself be represented by the abbreviation abbr., abbrv. or abbrev.
In strict analysis, abbreviations should not be confused with contractions or acronyms,
with which they share some semantic and phonetic functions, though all three are connoted by
the term "abbreviation" in loose parlance.An abbreviation is a shortening by any method;
a contraction is a reduction of size by the drawing together of the parts. A contraction
of a word is made by omitting certain letters or syllables and bringing together the first
and last letters or elements; an abbreviation may be made by omitting certain portions from
the interior or by cutting off a part. A contraction is an abbreviation, but an abbreviation is
not necessarily a contraction. However, normally, acronyms are regarded as a subgroup of abbreviations.
Abbreviations can also be used to give a different context to the word itself, such as "PIN Number".
History
Abbreviations have been used as long as phonetic scripts have existed, in some sense actually
being more common in early literacy, where spelling out a whole word was often avoided,
initial letters commonly being used to represent words in specific application. By classical
Greece and Rome, the reduction of words to single letters was still normal, but no longer
a default. An increase in literacy has, historically,
sometimes spawned a trend toward abbreviation. The standardisation of English in the 15th
through 17th centuries included such a growth in the use of abbreviations. At first, abbreviations
were sometimes represented with various suspension signs, not only periods. For example, sequences
like ‹er› were replaced with ‹ɔ›, as in ‹mastɔ› for master and ‹exacɔbate›
for exacerbate. While this may seem trivial, it was symptomatic of an attempt by people
manually reproducing academic texts to reduce the copy time. An example from the Oxford
University Register, 1503:
Mastɔ subwardenɔ y ɔmēde me to you. And wherɔ y wrot to you the last wyke that y
trouyde itt good to differrɔ thelectionɔ ovɔ to quīdenaɔ tinitatis y have be thougħt
me synɔ that itt woll be thenɔ a bowte mydsomɔ.
During the growth of philological linguistic theory in academic Britain, abbreviating became
very fashionable. The use of abbreviation for the names of J. R. R. Tolkien and his
friend C. S. Lewis, and other members of the Oxford literary group known as the Inklings,
are sometimes cited as symptomatic of this. Likewise, a century earlier in Boston, a fad
of abbreviation started that swept the United States, with the globally popular term OK
generally credited as a remnant of its influence. After World War II, the British greatly reduced
the use of the full stop and other punctuation points after abbreviations in at least semi-formal
writing, while the Americans more readily kept such use until more recently, and still
maintain it more than Britons. The classic example, considered by their American counterparts
quite curious, was the maintenance of the internal comma in a British organisation of
secret agents called the "Special Operations, Executive" — "S.O.,E" — which is not found
in histories written after about 1960. But before that, many Britons were more scrupulous
at maintaining the French form. In French, the period only follows an abbreviation if
the last letter in the abbreviation is not the last letter of its antecedent: "M." is
the abbreviation for "monsieur" while "Mme" is that for "madame". Like many other cross-channel
linguistic acquisitions, many Britons readily took this up and followed this rule themselves,
while the Americans took a simpler rule and applied it rigorously.
Over the years, however, the lack of convention in some style guides has made it difficult
to determine which two-word abbreviations should be abbreviated with periods and which
should not. The U.S. media tend to use periods in two-word abbreviations like United States,
but not personal computer or television. Many British publications have gradually done away
with the use of periods in abbreviations. Minimization of punctuation in typewritten
material became economically desirable in the 1960s and 1970s for the many users of
carbon-film ribbons since a period or comma consumed the same length of non-reusable expensive
ribbon as did a capital letter. Widespread use of electronic communication
through mobile phones and the Internet during the 1990s allowed for a marked rise in colloquial
abbreviation. This was due largely to increasing popularity of textual communication services
such as instant- and text messaging. SMS, for instance, supports message lengths of
160 characters at most. This brevity gave rise to an informal abbreviation scheme sometimes
called Textese, with which 10% or more of the words in a typical SMS message are abbreviated.
More recently Twitter, a popular social networking service, began driving abbreviation use with
140 character message limits. Style conventions in English
In modern English there are several conventions for abbreviations, and the choice may be confusing.
The only rule universally accepted is that one should be consistent, and to make this
easier, publishers express their preferences in a style guide. Questions which arise include
those in the following subsections. Lowercase letters
If the original word was capitalized then the first letter of its abbreviation should
retain the capital, for example Lev. for Leviticus. When a word is abbreviated to more than a
single letter and was originally spelled with lower case letters then there is no need for
capitalization. However, when abbreviating a phrase where only the first letter of each
word is taken, then all letters should be capitalized, as in YTD for year-to-date, PCB
for printed circuit board and FYI for for your information. However, see the following
section regarding abbreviations that have become common vocabulary: these are no longer
written with capital letters. Periods and spaces
A period is often used to signify an abbreviation, but opinion is divided as to when and if this
should happen. In British English, according to Hart's Rules,
the general rule is that abbreviations terminate with a full stop, whereas contractions do
not. In American English, the period is usually
included. In some cases periods are optional, as in either US or U.S. for United States,
EU or E.U. for European Union, and UN or U.N. for United Nations. There are some house styles,
however—American ones included—that remove the periods from almost all abbreviations.
For example: The U.S. Manual on Uniform Traffic Control
Devices advises that periods should not be used with abbreviations on road signs, except
for cardinal directions as part of a destination name.
AMA style, used in many medical journals, uses no periods in abbreviations or acronyms,
with almost no exceptions. Thus eg, ie, vs, et al., Dr, Mr, MRI, ICU, and hundreds of
others contain no periods. The only exceptions are "No."; initials within persons' names;
and "St." within persons' names when the person prefers it.
Acronyms that were originally capitalized but have since entered the vocabulary as generic
words are no longer written with capital letters nor with any periods. Examples are sonar,
radar, lidar, laser, snafu, and scuba. Today, spaces are generally not used between
single-letter abbreviations of words in the same phrase, so one almost never encounters
"U. S." When an abbreviation appears at the end of
a sentence, only one period is used: The capital of the United States is Washington, D.C.
Plural forms To form the plural of Runs Batted In, simply
add an s to the end of RBI. RBIs
For all other rules, see below: To form the plural of an abbreviation, a number,
or a capital letter used as a noun, simply add a lowercase s to the end. Apostrophes
following decades and single letters are also common.
A group of MPs The roaring 20s
Mind your Ps and Qs To indicate the plural of the abbreviation
or symbol of a unit of measure, the same form is used as in the singular.
1 lb or 20 lb. 1 ft or 16 ft.
1 min or 45 min. When an abbreviation contains more than one
full point, Hart's Rules recommends putting the s after the final one.
Ph.D.s M.Phil.s
the d.t.s However, subject to any house style or consistency
requirement, the same plurals may be rendered less formally as:
PhDs MPhils
the DTs. According to Hart's Rules, an apostrophe may
be used in rare cases where clarity calls for it, for example when letters or symbols
are referred to as objects. The x's of the equation
Dot the i's and cross the t's However, the apostrophe can be dispensed with
if the items are set in italics or quotes: The xs of the equation
Dot the 'i's and cross the 't's In Latin, and continuing to the derivative
forms in European languages as well as English, single-letter abbreviations had the plural
being a doubling of the letter for note-taking. Most of these deal with writing and publishing.
A few longer abbreviations use this as well. Conventions followed by publications and newspapers
United States Publications based in the U.S. tend to follow
the style guides of The Chicago Manual of Style and the Associated Press. The U.S. Government
follows a style guide published by the U.S. Government Printing Office. The National Institute
of Standards and Technology sets the style for abbreviations of units.
United Kingdom Many British publications follow some of these
guidelines in abbreviation: For the sake of convenience, many British
publications, including the BBC and The Guardian, have completely done away with the use of
full stops or periods in all abbreviations. These include:
Social titles, like Ms or Mr Capt, Prof, etc.; Two-letter abbreviations for countries;
Abbreviations beyond three letters; Words seldom abbreviated with lower case letters
Names. A notable exception is The Economist which writes "Mr F. W. de Klerk".
Scientific units.
Acronyms are often referred to with only the first letter of the abbreviation capitalized.
For instance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation can be abbreviated as "Nato" or "NATO", and
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome as "Sars" or "SARS".
Initialisms are always written in capitals; for example the "British Broadcasting Corporation"
is abbreviated to "BBC", never "Bbc". An initialism is similar to acronym but is not pronounced
as a word. When abbreviating scientific units, no space
is added between the number and unit. Miscellaneous and general rules
A doubled letter appears in abbreviations of some Welsh names, as in Welsh the double
"l" is a separate sound: "Ll. George" for David Lloyd George.
Some titles, such as "Reverend" and "Honourable", are spelt out when preceded by "the", rather
than as "Rev." or "Hon." respectively. This is true for most British publications, and
some in the United States. A repeatedly used abbreviation should be spelt
out for identification on its first occurrence in a written or spoken passage. Abbreviations
likely to be unfamiliar to many readers should be avoided.
Measurement shorthand – symbol or abbreviation
Writers often use shorthand to denote units of measure. Such shorthand can be an abbreviation,
such as "in" for "inch" or can be a symbol such as "km" for "kilometre".
The shorthand "in" applies to English only – in Afrikaans for example, the shorthand
"dm" is used for the equivalent Afrikaans word "duim". Since both "in" and "dm" are
contractions of the same word, but in different languages, they are abbreviations. A symbol
on the other hand, defined as "Mark or character taken as the conventional sign of some object
or idea or process" applies the appropriate shorthand by substitution rather than by contraction.
Since the shorthand for kilometre is "km" in both languages and the letter "k" does
not appear in the expansion of either translation, "km" is a symbol as it is a substitution rather
than a contraction. In the International System of Units manual
the word "symbol" is used consistently to define the shorthand used to represent the
various SI units of measure. The manual also defines the way in which units should be written,
the principal rules being: The conventions for upper and lower case letters
must be observed – for example 1 MW is equal to 1,000,000,000 mW.
No periods should be inserted between letters – for example "m.s" is the symbol for "metres
multiplied by seconds", but "ms" is the symbol for milliseconds.
No periods should follow the symbol unless the syntax of the sentence demands otherwise.
The singular and plural versions of the symbol are identical – not all languages use the
letter "s" to denote a plural. Syllabic abbreviation
A syllabic abbreviation is an abbreviation formed from initial syllables of several words,
such as Interpol = International + police. It is a variant of the acronym. Syllabic abbreviations
are usually written using lower case, sometimes starting with a capital letter, and are always
pronounced as words rather than letter by letter. Syllabic abbreviations should be distinguished
from portmanteaus, which combine two words without necessarily taking whole syllables
from each. Usage
Different languages Syllabic abbreviations are not widely used
in English or French. The United States Navy, however, often uses syllabic abbreviations,
as described below. On the other hand, they prevailed in Germany
under the Nazis and in the Soviet Union for naming the plethora of new bureaucratic organisations.
For example, Gestapo stands for Geheime Staats-Polizei, or "secret state police". Similarly, Leninist
organisations such as the Comintern and Komsomol used Russian language syllabic abbreviations.
This has caused syllabic abbreviations to have negative connotations, notwithstanding
that such abbreviations were used in Germany even before the Nazis came to power, e.g.,
Schupo for Schutzpolizei. Syllabic abbreviations were also typical for
the German language used in the German Democratic Republic, e.g. Stasi for Staatssicherheit
or Vopo for Volkspolizist. Other uses are in company or product names such as Agfa,
Hanuta or Haribo. East Asian languages whose writing uses Chinese-originated
ideograms instead of an alphabet form abbreviations similarly by using key characters from a term
or phrase. For example, in Japanese the term for the United Nations, kokusai rengō is
often abbreviated to kokuren. in Japanese; see also Japanese abbreviated and contracted
words). The syllabic abbreviation is frequently used for universities: for instance, Běidà
for Běijīng Dàxué and Tōdai for Tōkyō daigaku. The English phrase "Gung ho" originated
as a Chinese abbreviation. Organisations
Partially syllabic abbreviations are preferred by the US Navy, as it increases readability
amidst the large number of initialisms that would otherwise have to fit into the same
acronyms. Hence DESRON 6 is used to mean "Destroyer Squadron 6", while COMNAVAIRLANT would be
"Commander, Naval Air Force Atlantic." See also
Clipping List of abbreviations used in medical prescriptions
List of abbreviations in photography List of acronyms
List of classical abbreviations List of medieval abbreviations
The abbreviations used in the 1913 edition of Webster's dictionary
References
External links Acronyms at DMOZ