Abbreviation

An abbreviation (from Latin brevis "short") is a shorter form of a word. More particularly, an abbreviation is a letter or group of letters, taken from a word or words, and employed to represent them for the sake of brevity. For example, the word "abbreviation" can be abbreviated as "abbr." or "abbrev."

Types of abbreviations

Apart from the common form of shortening one word, there are other types of abbreviations. These include acronym and initialism (including three-letter acronyms), apocope, clipping, elision, syncope, syllabic abbreviation, and portmanteau.

Syllabic abbreviation

Related article: Clipping (lexicography)

A syllabic abbreviation (SA) is an abbreviation formed from (usually) initial syllables of several words, such as Interpol for International police, but should be distinguished from portmanteaux. They are usually written in lower case, sometimes starting with a capital letter, and are always pronounced as words rather than letter by letter.

Use in different languages

Syllabic abbreviations are not widely used in English or French, but are common in certain languages, like German and Russian.

They prevailed in Germany under the Nazis and in the Soviet Union for naming the plethora of new bureaucratic organizations. For example, Gestapo stands for Geheime Staats-Polizei, or "secret state police". This has given syllabic abbreviations a negative connotation, even though they were used in Germany before the Nazis, such as Schupo for Schutzpolizist. Even now Germans call part of their police Kripo for Kriminalpolizei. Syllabic abbreviations were also typical of German language used in the German Democratic Republic, for example, Stasi for Staatssicherheit ("state security", the secret police and secret service) or Vopo for Volkspolizist ("people's policeman").

Some syllabic abbreviations from Russian that are familiar to English speakers include samizdat and kolkhoz. The English names for the Soviet "Comintern" (Communist International) and "Milrevcom" (Military Revolution Committee) are further examples.

Orwell's novel 1984 uses fictional syllabic abbreviations like "Engsoc" (English Socialism) to evoke the use of language under the Nazi and Soviet regimes.

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 (国際連合) is often abbreviated to kokuren (国連). Another classic example is shogun. Such abbreviations are called ryakugo (略語) in Japanese. SAs are frequently used for names of universities: for instance, Beida (北大, Běidà) for Peking University (Beijing), Yondae (연대) for the Yonsei University, Seouldae (서울대) for the Seoul National University and Tōdai (東大) for the University of Tokyo.

Usage of syllabic abbreviations in organisations

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 (in the full capital form) to mean "Destroyer Squadron 6," and DEFCON means "Defense Condition".

Style conventions

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 this end publishers express their preferences in a style guide.

Questions which arise include the following:

• Use of upper or lower case letters. If the original word was capitalised, then the first letter of its abbreviation should retain the capital, for example Lev. for Leviticus. When abbreviating words spelled with lower case letters, there is no need for capitalization, therefore no need for a consistent rule.
• Use of periods (full stops) and spaces, for example when abbreviating United States, should one write "US", "U.S." or "U. S."? Spaces are generally not used between single letter abbreviations of words in the same phrase, so one almost never encounters "U. S.". In American English, the period is usually added if the abbreviation may be interpreted as a word, though some American writers do not use a period here. Sometimes, periods are used for certain acronyms but not others; a notable instance in American English is to write United States, European Union, and United Nations as U.S., EU, and UN respectively. There is no stop/period between letters of the same word, for example St. and not S.t. for Saint. While users of British English often abbreviate in the same manner, it is more common in formal writing that abbreviations are written with full stops if the word has been cut at the point of abbreviation (for example, "Street" — "St[reet]" — becomes "St."), but not otherwise ("Saint" — "S[ain]t" — becomes "St"); a third standard removes the full stops from all abbreviations (both "Saint" and "Street" become "St"). Thus in the United Kingdom, titles such as "Doctor", "Mister" and "Mistress" are commonly abbreviated as "Dr", "Mr", and "Mrs" respectively, but they are also frequently written, as in Canada and the U.S., as "Dr.", "Mr." and "Mrs."
• Acronyms that were originally capitalized (with or without periods) but have since "stood the test of time" by entering the vocabulary as generic words are no longer abbreviated with capital letters nor with any periods — sonar, radar, lidar, laser, and scuba, for example.
• Whether to add an apostrophe for a plural where the plural is not formed by doubling up the last letter: should one write CDs or CD's? The apostrophe is not needed grammatically but sometimes is added to make it clear that the s is not part of the abbreviation. Because the apostrophe most often represents possession or a contraction, some style guides prefer that it not be used at all with abbreviations, but only with individual letters — "Dot all your i's and cross all your t's!" or "Mind your p's and q's!" — or numbers — "The dyslexic student mixes up his S's and 5's." Thus numbers, such as decades, that are understood to represent other concepts, are not written with apostrophes either — "The U.S. enjoyed an economic boom in the 1990s and the Roaring ’20s", referring to decades, or "I am going to the bank to exchange four 5's for two 10's", where the 5's and 10's refer to banknotes.

Conventions followed by publications and newspapers:

• Publications based in the United States 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.
  • There is some inconsistency in abbreviation styles, however, as they are not rigorously defined by style guides. Some two-word abbreviations, like "United Nations", are abbreviated with uppercase letters and periods, and others, like "personal computer" (PC) and "compact disc" (CD), are not; rather, they are typically abbreviated without periods and in uppercase letters. A third variation is to use lowercase letters with periods; this is used by Time Magazine in abbreviating "public relations" (p.r.). Moreover, even three-word abbreviations (most U.S. publications use uppercase abbreviations without periods) are sometimes not consistently abbreviated, even within the same article.
  • The New York Times is unique in having a consistent style by always abbreviating with periods: P.C., I.B.M., P.R. This is in contrast with the trend of British publications to completely make do without periods for convenience.

• 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 (though these would not have had full stops in any case — see above) Capt, Prof, etc.;
    • Two-letter abbreviations for countries (US, not U.S.);
    • Words are seldom abbreviated with lower case letters (PR, instead of p.r., or pr)
    • Abbreviations beyond three letters (full caps for all except initialisms);
    • Names (FW de Klerk, GB Whiteley, Park JS). A notable exception is the Economist (Mr F. W. de Klerk)
    • Scientific units.
  • Acronyms are often referred to with only the first letter of the abbreviation capitalised. For instance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation can be abbreviated as Nato or NATO, and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome as Sars or SARS (compare with laser which has made the full transition to an English word and is rarely capitalised at all). Initialisms (which are similar to acronyms but which are not pronounced as words) are always written in capitals, for instance the British Broadcasting Corporation is abbreviated to BBC, never Bbc.
  • When abbreviating scientific units, no space is added between the number and unit (100mph, 100m, 10cm, 10ºC). (This is contrary to the SI standard, see below.)

Miscellaneous and general rules

• Plurals are often formed by doubling up the last letter of the abbreviation. Most of these deal with writing and publishing: MS=manuscript, MSS=manuscripts; l=line, ll=lines; p=page, pp=pages; s=section, ss=sections; op.=opus, opp.=opera). This form, derived from Latin is used in Europe in many places: dd=didots. "The following (lines or pages)" is denoted by ff. One example that does not concern printing is hh=hands.
• A doubled letter also appears in abbreviations of some Welsh names, as in Welsh the double "l" is a separate sound: "Ll. George" for (British prime minister) 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.
• It is usually advised to spell out the abbreviation where it is new or unfamiliar to the reader (UNESCO in a magazine about music, because it refers to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, whose work does not concern music).

Measurement

• The SI international system has a clearly defined set of base units, from which other "derived" units may be obtained. The abbreviations, or more accurately "symbols" (using Roman letters or Greek in the case of ohm) for these units are also clearly defined together with a set of prefixes, themselves symbolised (abbreviated) with Roman letters (Greek in the singular case of micro, µ), denoting powers of ten. The system is internationally recognised. Periods are not used, except as described below. Neither a unit nor its symbol takes "s" for plural.
• In the SI international system of units there should never be a period after or inside the unit; both 10 k.m. and 10 k.m are wrong — the only correct form is 10 km (only followed with a period when at the end of a sentence).
• Placing a period "within" a unit will alter its meaning, as a period is used in the SI system to form compound units and denotes multiplication. Ideally this period should be raised to the centre of the line, but it is often not. So for instance 5 ms means 5 millisecond(s), whereas 5 m.s means 5 metre·second(s). The "m.s" here is a compound unit formed from the product of two fundamental SI units — metre and second.
• There should always be a (non-breaking) space between the number and the unit — 10A, 15V, and 25km are all incorrect; they should be 10 A, 15 V and 25 km. The case of letters (uppercase or lowercase) is also an important part of the SI system and the case should never be changed because of a misguided attempt to follow an abbreviation style. 10 S is quite different in meaning, to a scientist or engineer, from 10 s. The former denotes 10 siemens (a unit of conductance), the latter 10 seconds. Units named after people use a symbol of an upper case first letter (S, Pa, A, V, N, Wb, W), but spelt out in full in lower case, (siemens, pascal, ampere, volt, newton, weber and watt). By contrast g, l, m, s, cd, h represent gramme, litre, metre, second, candela and hectare respectively. The one slight exception to this rule is the symbol for litre is allowed to be L to help avoid confusion with an upper case i or a one in some type styles — compare l, I, and 1.
• Likewise the abbreviations of the prefixes denoting powers of ten are case sensitive — m (milli) is a thousandth, M (mega) is a million times, so by inadvertent changes of case one may introduce (in this example) an error of a factor of 1 000 000 000. When written out in full, lowercase is used for both the prefix and the unit, for example, megampere for MA, millivolt for mV, nanometre for nm, gigacandela for Gcd.
• The above rules, if followed, ensure that the SI system is always unambiguous, so for instance mK is a millikelvin, MK is a megakelvin, K.m is a kelvin.metre, and km is a kilometre. Forms such as k.m and km are ill-formed and technically meaningless in the SI system although it may be possible to infer which unit is meant from the context.

Powers of ten prefixes:

Factor   Prefix    Symbol

• 10²⁴  yotta  Y
• 10²¹  zetta  Z
• 10¹⁸  exa    E
• 10¹⁵  peta   P
• 10¹²  tera   T
• 10⁹  giga   G
• 10⁶  mega   M
• 10³  kilo   k
• 10²  hecto  h
• 10¹  deka   da
• 10⁻¹  deci   d
• 10⁻²  centi  c
• 10⁻³  milli  m
• 10⁻⁶  micro  µ
• 10⁻⁹  nano   n
• 10⁻¹²  pico   p
• 10⁻¹⁵  femto  f
• 10⁻¹⁸  atto   a
• 10⁻²¹  zepto  z
• 10⁻²⁴  yocto  y

History

After World War II, the British greatly reduced their use of the full stop and other punctuations after abbreviations in at least semi-formal writing, while the Americans more readily kept its 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 organization 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" and "Mlle" for "Mademoiselle". 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 abbreviate two-word abbreviations like United States (U.S.), but surprisingly, not personal computer (PC) or television (TV), which is a source of confusion. Many British publications have gradually done away with the use of periods in abbreviations completely.

Examples

• List of classical abbreviations
• List of mediaeval abbreviations
• List of abbreviations in use in 1911
• List of acronyms and initialisms
• The abbreviations used in the 1913 edition of Webster's dictionary

See also

• Lists of abbreviations
• List of syllabic abbreviations
• Neologism, word, term, or phrase which has been recently created
• Internet slang, list of computing and IT abbreviations, list of medical abbreviations, list of government and military acronyms, abbreviations used in CIA World Factbook,
• ISO language code, ISO country code.
• Ditloid
• Acronym
• Scribal abbreviation

External links

Look up abbreviation in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• AbbreviationZ acronyms, abbreviations & Initialisms directory.
• Acronym Finder — searchable acronyms and abbreviations site (over 515,000 entries)
• Acronyma — large database of acronyms and abbreviations (over 472,000 entries)
• All Acronyms — searchable acronyms and abbreviations database sorted by categories and alphabetically (more than 600,000 entries)
• Special Dictionary — large abbreviation, acronym and initialism database with lookup function (over 590,000 definitions)
• Common, Uncommon and Specialized Abbreviations
• Financial and accounting abbreviations
• Ecclesiastical Abbreviations - Catholic Encyclopedia

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