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Abbreviation

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For guidelines on making and editing abbreviation articles on Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Disambiguation and abbreviations. This article needs additional citations for verification.

Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (May 2008) An abbreviation (from Latin brevis \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

\\

Contents

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? ?

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? ? ?

1 History

2 Types of abbreviation

o 2.1 Syllabic abbreviation

? 2.1.1 Use in various languages ? 2.1.2 Syllabic abbreviations in names of organizations

3 Style conventions in English

o 3.1 Lowercase letters

o 3.2 Periods (full stops) and spaces o 3.3 Plural forms

o 3.4 Conventions followed by publications and newspapers

? 3.4.1 United States ? 3.4.2 United Kingdom

? 3.4.3 Miscellaneous and general rules

4 Measurement 5 See also 6 References

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7 External links

[edit] History

Abbreviation has been used as long as phonetic script existed, in some senses 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 the default.

An increase in literacy has, historically, sometimes spawned a trend toward abbreviation. The standardization of English in the 15th through 17th centuries included such a growth in the use of abbreviation[1]. At first, abbreviations were sometimes represented with various suspension signs, not only periods. For example, specific phoneme sets like \were dropped from words and replaced with ?, like \?\instead of \or exac?bate instead of \symptomatic of an attempt by people manually reproducing academic texts to reduce their copy time. An example from the Oxford university Register, 1503:

Mast? subwarden? y ?mēde me to you. And wher? y wrot to you the last wyke that y trouyde itt good to differr? thelection? ov? to quīdena? tinitatis y have be thoug?t me syn? that itt woll be then? a bowte mydsom?.

In the 1830s in the United States, starting with Boston, abbreviation became a fad. For example, during the growth of philological linguistic theory in academic Britain, abbreviating became very trendy. The use of abbreviation for the names of \of modern etymology\J. R. R. Tolkien and his friend C. S. Lewis, and other members of 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.[2][3]

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

\— \— 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: \is the abbreviation for \while \is that for \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 not personal computer (PC) or television (TV). Many British publications have gradually done away with the use of periods in abbreviations completely. Minimization of punctuation in typewritten matter 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.

[edit] Types of abbreviation

Apart from the common form of word-contraction, there are other types of abbreviation. These include acronym and initialism (including

three-letter acronyms), apocope, clipping, elision, syncope, syllabic abbreviation, and portmanteau words.

[edit] Syllabic abbreviation

See also: Clipping (morphology)

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 portmanteau words. They are usually written in lower case, sometimes starting with a capital letter, and are always pronounced as words rather than letter by letter. [edit] Use in various 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 \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 (\Vopo for Volkspolizist (\

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 \(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). 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 (??) for the Yonsei University, Seouldae (???) for the Seoul National University and Tōdai (東大) for the University of Tokyo.

[edit] Syllabic abbreviations in names of organizations

Syllabic abbreviations are preferred by the U.S. 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 \\

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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 abbreviating words spelled with lower case letters, there is no need for capitalization, therefore no need for a consistent rule.

[edit] Periods (full stops) and spaces

A period (full stop) is sometimes written after an abbreviated word, but there is much disagreement and many exceptions.

There is never a period (full stop) between letters of the same word. For example, Tiberius is abbreviated as Tb. and not as T.b..

In formal British English, according to Hart's Rules, it is more common to write abbreviations with full stops if the word has been cut at the point of abbreviation but not otherwise: for example:

\Doctor\–r\

? \Professor\? \Reverend\–d\

? \The Right Honourable\–t Hon...\

?

In American English, the period is usually added if the abbreviation might otherwise be interpreted as a word, but some American writers do not use a period here. Sometimes, periods are used for certain initialisms 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.

A third standard removes the full stops from all abbreviations (both \ and \ become \). 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. (For example, \Blvd\, \Jefferson\, and \XING\ all follow this recommendation.)

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