| 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.
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, e.g., Lev. for Leviticus. When abbreviating words spelt with lower case letters, there is no consistent
rule.
- Use of periods (full stops) and spaces, e.g. when abbreviating United States, should one write US, U.S. or 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. There is no stop/period between letters of the same word, e.g., St. and not S.t. for Saint.
- Many British publications and websites (notably the BBC) follow these guidelines:
- If the abbreviation retains the last letter of the original (as, for example "Mister"), the period is not included: Mr John
Smith.
- If the abbreviation does not have the last letter of the original, the period is included. "exempli gratia" is abbreviated as
"e.g." (though many British writers would use "eg").
- If used to refer to a country or a group like the United States or United Nations, the period is not included: US and UN
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. 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.
- 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). This form, derived from Latin is used in Europe in many places: dd=didots. One example that does not concern printing is hh=hands.
- 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.
History
After the Second World War, the British greatly reduced their use of the full stop and other punctuations after abbreviations
in at last 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 that for the British organization of secret agents called 'Special Operations, Executive' - specifically, S.O.,E.
- which you will not find 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 of 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
Mademoiselle yields Mlle as its own abbreviation. Like many other cross-channel linguistic acquisitions, many Britons readily took this up and followed this rule themselves, while
the Americans took a more simplistic rule and applied it rigorously.
Syllabic Abbreviations
Another way of forming an abbreviation is syllable by syllable. This is prefered by the US Navy as it increases readability
amidst the large number of initialisms that have to fit into the same letter
abbreviation or acronym. Hence DESRON 6 is used (in the full capital form) to
mean "Destroyer Squadron 6," while COMNAVFORLANT would be "Commander, Naval Force (in the) Atlantic."
This method is deprecated in both British and American society in general. Part of the antipathy toward it was its prevalence
in Germany under the Nazis and the Soviet Union. For example,
Gestapo comes from Geheime Staats-Polizei, or "secret state police" while Comintern for the Communist International is another. Another reason is that
the French do not use it.
East Asian languages whose writing derives from Chinese ideograms instead of an alphabet form abbreviations
similarly by using key characters from a phrase 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). Such abbreviations are called ryakugo (略語) in Japanese. The classic example, of course, is shogun.
Examples
External links
- initialism.com (http://www.initialism.com)—An acronyms and abbreviations directory (over 300,000
entries)
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