Abbreviation
Abbreviation (from Latin brevis "short") is strictly a shortening, but 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.
Usage
Abbreviations, both of single words and of phrases, having a meaning more or less fixed and recognised, are common in ancient writings and inscriptions (see Palaeography and Diplomatic), and very many are in use at the present time. A distinction is to be observed between abbreviations and the contractions that are frequently to be met with in old manuscripts, and even in early printed books, whereby letters are dropped out here and there, or particular collocations of letters represented by somewhat arbitrary symbols. The commonest form of abbreviation is the substitution for a word of its initial letter; but, with a view to prevent ambiguity, one or more of the other letters are frequently added. In some languages, letters are often doubled to indicate a plural or a superlative.
Style conventions
In modern English there are several conventions in use for abbreviations and it may not be clear which one is best.
Publishers sometimes express their preferences in a style guide.
Some of the questions which may arise:
- Use of upper or lower case letters: If the original word was capitalised, then the first letter of its abbreviation will also be capital, e.g., U.S. for United States. But when abbreviating lower case letters, there is no clear guide.
- Usage of periods (full-stops) and space, e.g., US, U.S. or U. S. In American English and other variants, the period should be added if the abbreviation may be interpreted as a word, but otherwise there is no clear guide. There is no period between letters of the same word, e.g., St. and not S.t. for Saint.
- With reference to the above point, many British publications and websites (the BBC being a prominent example) abbreviate words by the following guidelines:
- If the abbreviated word has the last alphabet of the original, the period is not included. As an example, "Mister" is abbreviated as "Mr" and "Missus" as "Mrs".
- If the abbreviated word does not have the last alphabet of the original, the period is included. "Exempli gratis", which means "for example", is abbreviated as "e.g." in this case.
- If used to refer to a country or a group like the United States or United Nations, the period is not included. In these examples US and UN are used respectively.
- Acronyms are sometimes referred to with only the first letter of the abbreviation capitalised. For instance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization can be abbreviated as Nato, and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome as Sars. This never happens to initialisms such as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Initialisms are sometimes also called acronyms, but unlike true acronyms they can never be pronounced as words (see Acronym for more on the difference).
- Whether to add an apostrophe for a plural, e.g., CDs vs 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.
In East Asian languages which use Chinese ideograms instead of an alphabet, abbreviations are similarly formed by using key characters instead of letters. For example, in Japanese the term for the United Nations, kokusai rengō (国際連合) is often abbreviated to kokuren (国連).
Examples
See also
