Blend

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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In linguistics, a i
 is a word formed from parts of two or more other words. These parts are sometimes, but
not always, morphemes.

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aedit]Linguistics

Blends deal with the action of abridging and then combining various lexemes to form a new word. However, the
process of defining which words are true blends and which are not is more complicated. The difficulty comes in
]
determining which parts of a new word are "recoverable" (its root can be distinguished).a

There are many types of blends, based on how they are formed. Algeo, a linguist, proposed dividing blends into
three groupsa ] :

. Phonemic Overlap: a syllable or part of a syllable is shared between two words

2. Clipping: the shortening of two words and then compounding them

3. Phonemic Overlap and Clipping: shortening of two words to a shared syllable and then compounding

However, classification of types of blends is not standard among all linguists.

aedit]Y
 
-ost blends are formed by one of the following methods:

. The beginning of one word is added to the end of the other (see portmanteau). For example,   is
a blend of i 
and


.
  á taneous (5) + broadá (2) ĺ simulcast (3, exception)

 áoke ( ) + f  ( ) ĺ smog ( )
 á oon ( ) + f
 ( ) ĺ spork ( )

2. The beginnings of two words are combined. For example,  is a blend
of
i
 and ?
.

3. Two words are blended around a common sequence of sounds. For example, the word 
 
,
from a song by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, is a blend of 3
?  and ? 
? , and the
word motel is a blend of  or and h 

4. -ultiple sounds from two component words are blended, while mostly preserving the sounds' order.
Poet Lewis Carroll was well known for these kinds of blends. An example of this is the word 

, a
blend of
 and 
. This method is difficult to achieve and is considered a sign of Carroll's
verbal wit.a 

] A recent example is stagflation, a blend of ánation and in  .

When two words are combined in their entirety, the result is considered a compound word rather than a blend.
For example, bagpipe is a compound, not a blend, of  and 

aedit]c
 

á
Blending can also apply to roots rather than words, for instance in Israeli Hebrew.
"Israeli ʸʥ ʴʧʣ  µbulldozer¶ hybridizes (-ishnaic Hebrew>>)Israeli ʴʧʣ ¥dħp µpush¶ and (Biblical
Hebrew>>)Israeli ʸʴʧ ¥ħpr µdig¶a...] Israeli ʨ ʥ ʨʬʹ 


µzapping, surfing the channels, flipping through the
channels¶ derives from (i) (Hebrew>)Israeli ʨ ʬʹ 

µremote control¶, an ellipsis ± like English 
 (but
using the noun instead) ± of the (widely known) compound ʷ ʥ ʧʸ ʨʬʹ 

 ± cf. the Academy of the
Hebrew Language¶s ʷ ʧʸ ʨʬ ʹ 

; and (ii) (Hebrew>)Israeli ʨ ʥ ʨʹ 

µwandering,
vagrancy¶. Israeli ʨ ʥ ʨʬʹ 


was introduced by the Academy of the Hebrew Language in a...]

.
Synchronically, it might appear to result from reduplication of the final consonant of 

µremote control¶.
Another example of blending which has also been explained as mere reduplication
is Israeli ʺʩ ʬʩʬʧʢ 


µfire-fly, glow-fly, Lampyris¶. This coinage by Hayyim Nahman Bialik blends
(Hebrew>)Israeli ʺʬ ʧʢ !

µburning coal¶ with (Hebrew>)Israeli ʤʬʩ ʬ

 µnight¶. Compare this with the
unblended ʺʩ ʬʩʬʫʧ 


µ(black) redstart, Phœnicurus¶ (<<Biblical Hebrew ʬ ʩ ʬʫʧ µdull red, reddish¶).
Synchronically speaking though, most native Israeli-speakers feel that 


includes a reduplication of the
third radical of ʬʧʢ ¥għl. This is incidentally how Ernest Kleina2] explains


. Since he is attempting to
provide etymology, his description might be misleading if one agrees that Hayyim Nahman Bialik had blending
in mind."a3]

"There are two possible etymological analyses for Israeli Hebrew ʸʴʱʫ  µbank clerk, teller¶. The first is
that it consists of (Hebrew>)Israeli ʳʱʫ ! µmoney¶ and the (International/Hebrew>)Israeli agentive suffix ʸ- "
. The second is that it is a quasi-portmanteau word which blends ʳʱʫ ! µmoney¶ and (Hebrew>)Israeli ʸʴʱ
¥spr µcount¶. Israeli Hebrew ʸʴʱʫ  started as a brand name but soon entered the common language.
Even if the second analysis is the correct one, the final syllable ʸ- " apparently facilitated nativization since it
was regarded as the Hebrew suffix ʸ- "# (probably of Persian pedigree), which usually refers to craftsmen and
professionals, for instance as in -endele -ocher Sforim¶s coinage ʸʨʥ ʨʸʮʱ 

 µrag-dealer¶."a4]

aedit]½
 á

 

Blending may occur with an error in
$ 



, the process by which a speaker uses his semantic
knowledge to choose words. Lewis Carroll's explanation, which gave rise to the use of 'portmanteau' for such
combinations, was:

Humpty Dumpty's theory, of two meanings packed into one word like a portmanteau, seems to me the right
explanation for all. For instance, take the two words "fuming" and "furious." -ake up your mind that you will say
both words ... you will say "frumious."a5]

The errors are based on similarity of meanings, rather than phonological similarities, and the morphemes or
phonemes stay in the same position within the syllablea].

aedit]Use

Some languages, like Japanese, encourage the shortening and merging of borrowed foreign words (as
in gairaigo), because they are long or difficult to pronounce in the target language. For example, , a
combination of the Japanese word  (meaning 
) and the clipped form  of the English loanword
"orchestra" (J. %
 ®
), is a Japanese blend that has entered the English language. (From the
article gairaigo.)

-any corporate brand names, trademarks, and initiatives, as well as names of corporations and organizations
themselves, are blends. For example, Wiktionary, one of Wikipedia's sister projects, is a blend
of î and 
. Also, Nabisco is a blend of the initial syllables of>

 
3?

aedit]See also

Clipping (morphology)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


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In linguistics,    is the word formation process which consists in the reduction of a word to one of its
parts (-archand:

). Clipping is also known as "truncation" or "shortening."

According to -archand (

), clippings are not coined as words belonging to the standard vocabulary of a
language. They originate as terms of a special group like schools, army, police, the medical profession, etc., in
the intimacy of a milieu where a hint is sufficient to indicate the whole. For
example, $(ination), 
(ematics), and
(oratory) originated in school slang;  (ulation) and
 (et =
credit) in stock-exchange slang; and &
(eran) and (tain) in army slang. While clipping terms of some
influential groups can pass into common usage, becoming part of Standard English, clippings of a socially
unimportant class or group will remain group slang.

Clipping mainly consists of the following types:

. Back clipping
2. Fore-clipping

3. -iddle clipping
4. Complex clipping
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aedit]Back clipping

Back clipping or apocopation is the most common type, in which the beginning is retained. The unclipped
original may be either a simple or a composite. Examples
are:  (advertisement), 
 (cablegram),  (doctor), $ (examination), $ (facsimile),  (gasoline), 
(gymnastics, gymnasium),  (memorandum), 

(muttonhead),  (public house),  (popular

music).

aedit]Fore-clipping

Fore-clipping or aphaeresis retains the final part.

Examples: 
 (parachute),  (raccoon), 
 (alligator),  (telephone), (turnpike), &
 (unive
rsity).

aedit]-iddle clipping
In middle clipping or syncope, the middle of the word is retained. Examples
are: 
 (influenza), ' or ' (pajamas/pyjamas), 

(apollinaris),  (head-
shrinker),
 (detective).

aedit]Complex clipping

Clipped forms are also used in compounds. One part of the original compound most often remains intact.
Examples are: 
 ( 
tele), 
(tical 
), "
 (anization ),
 
(
leum 
). Sometimes both halves of a compound are clipped as
in& 
(&gation 
ificate). In these cases it is difficult to know whether the resultant formation should be
treated as a clipping or as ablend, for the border between the two types is not always clear. According to Bauer
(
3), the easiest way to draw the distinction is to say that those forms which retain compound stress are
clipped compounds, whereas those that take simple word stress are not. By this criterion( 
)


 

- ", and 
 are all compounds made of clippings.

aedit]See also

 Abbreviation
 Clipping (phonetics)
 Compound (linguistics)
 Contraction (grammar)
 Diminutive

Abbreviation
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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An ii

  (from Latin &, meaning 

) 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 &
 can itself be represented by the abbreviation  , & or &

In strict analysis, abbreviations should not be confused with contractions or acronyms (including initialisms),
with which they share somesemantic and phonetic functions, though all three are connoted by the term
]:p 
"abbreviation" in loose parlance.a 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 either 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 (e.g. by the Council of Science Editors).

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aedit]History

u
1u 
&



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 can default.

An increase in literacy has, historically, sometimes spawned a trend toward abbreviation. The standardization
of English in the 5th through th centuries included such a growth in the use of abbreviation.a2] At first,
abbreviations were sometimes represented with various suspension signs, not only periods. For example,
specific phoneme sets like "er" were dropped from words and replaced with Â, like "mastÂ" instead of "master"
or exacÂbate instead of "exacerbate". While this seems trivial, it was symptomatic of an attempt by people
manually reproducing academic texts to reduce their copy time. An example from the Oxford University
Register, 503:

-ast subwarden y Âmēde me to you. And wher y wrot to you the last wyke that y trouyde itt good to differrÂ
thelection ov to quīdena tinitatis y have be thougħt me syn that itt woll be then a bowte mydsomÂ.

In the 30s 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 "Father of modern etymology" 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.a3]a4]

After World War II, the British greatly reduced their 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 organization of secret
agents called the "Special Operations, Executive" ² "S.O.,E" ² which is not found in histories written after
about
0.

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 
the last letter of its antecedent: "-." is the
abbreviation for "monsieur" while "-me" 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.a 

]

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 (U.S.), but not personal computer (PC) or television (TV).
-any British publications have gradually done away with the use of periods in abbreviations completely.

-inimization of punctuation in typewritten matter became economically desirable in the
0s and
0s for
the many users of carbon-filmribbons, 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

0s 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. S-S for instance supports message lengths of
0 characters at most (using the GS- 03.3 character set). This brevity gave rise to an informal abbreviation
scheme sometimes called Textese, with which 0% or more of the words in a typical S-S message are
abbreviated.a5] -ore recently Twitter, a popular social network service, began driving abbreviation use with 40
character message limits.

aedit]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 

 and to make this easier, publishers express their
preferences in a style guide. Questions which arise include those in the following subsections.

aedit]½


á



á
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.

aedit]

 á  á á
á 
á

A period (full stop) is sometimes written after an abbreviated word, but there are exceptions and a general lack
of consensus about when this should happen. There is some confusion over the strict distinction between an
abbreviation (a word shortened by omission of its  part) ² requiring a full point (or full stop or period) ²
and a contraction (a word or compound shortened by omission of a 
 part) ² which does not need a full
point or period. American English usage is less strict about this distinction and thus more likely to conclude a
contraction , e.g., 3 for "Junior" with a period.

In British English, according to Hart's Rules, the general rule is that abbreviations terminate with a full stop
]:p 
(period), whereas contractions do not.a

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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 writeG
u

, 4G, and G

5
 as G u , 4G, and G5 respectively.

A third standard removes the full stops from all abbreviations (both `u
` and `u

` become `u
`). The
U.S. -anual 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, `5
î

&`, `0 
3`, and `6427)58` all follow this recommendation.)

Acronyms that were originally capitalized (with or without periods) but have since entered the vocabulary as
generic words are no longer abbreviated with capital letters nor with any periods. Examples
are sonar, radar, lidar, laser, snafu, and scuba.

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, use only one period: The capital of the United States
is Washington, D.C.

aedit] 
 
á

To form the plural of an abbreviation, a number, or a capital letter used as a noun, simply add a lowercase  to
the end.

 A group of -Ps
 The roaring '20s
 -ind your Ps and Qs

To indicate the plural of the abbreviation of a unit of measure, the same form is used as in the singular.

 lb or 20 lb.

 ft or  ft.
 min or 45 min.

When an abbreviation contains more than one full point, ,

9:
 recommends to put the  after the final
one.

 Ph.D.s
 -.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
 -Phils

 the DTs. (This is the recommended form in the 5î;$2

0
4
.)

According to ,
9:
, 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 $s 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. -ost of these deal with writing and
publishing. A few longer abbreviations use this as well.

„


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aedit]3 
 á

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 i  á

á 

á
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á

Publications based in the U.S. tend to follow the style guides of the Chicago -anual of Style and
the Associated Press.a& 
] TheU.S. Government follows a style guide published by the U.S.
Government Printing Office.

aedit]
  

-any British publications follow some of these guidelines in abbreviation:

 For the sake of convenience, many British publications, including the BBC and -8, have
completely done away with the use of full stops or periods in all abbreviations. These include:

 Social titles, like -s or -r (though these would usually not have had full stops ² see above) Capt,
Prof, 
<

 Two-letter abbreviations for countries (`Gu`, not `G u `);

 Abbreviations beyond three letters (full caps for all except initialisms);
 Words seldom abbreviated with lower case letters (`6:`, instead of `  `, or ``)

 Names (`0=
`, `8 0

`, `63u`). A notable exception is -4 
which
writes `. 0 =
`.

 Scientific units (see -easurement below).

 Acronyms are often referred to with only the first letter of the abbreviation capitalised. For instance,
the North Atlantic Treaty Organisationcan be abbreviated as `5
` or `5-;`, and Severe Acute
Respiratory Syndrome as `u` or `u:u` (compare with `
` which has made the full transition to an
English word and is rarely capitalised at all).

 Initialisms are always written in capitals; for example the ` 

  

` is abbreviated
to ` `, never `  `. 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 ( 00mph, 00m, 0cm,
0°C). (This is contrary to the SI standard, see below.)
aedit]-á

á


 

á

 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) 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.

for example PO for post office

aedit]-easurement

The International System of Units (SI) defines a set of base units, from which other "derived" units may be
obtained. The abbreviations, or more accurately "symbols" (using Roman letters, Greek letters in the case
of ohm and micro and other characters in the case of degrees celsius) for these units are also clearly defined
together with a set of prefixes for which there are also abbreviations or symbols. There should never be a
period after or inside a unit; both ' 0 k.m.' and ' 0 k.m' are wrong ² the only correct form is ' 0 km' (only
followed with a period when at the end of a sentence).

A period "within" a compound unit denotes multiplication of the base units on each side of it. Ideally, this period
should be raised to the centre of the line, but often it is not. 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 ² metre and second. However, the middle dot symbol (·, unicode U+00B, HT-L
&middot;) is the preferred way to represent compound units when available, e.g. "5 m·s".

There should always be a (non-breaking) space between the number and the unit ² '25 km' is correct, and
'25km' is incorrect. In Section 5.3.3. of -)


u
G
u), the International Bureau of
Weights and -easures (BIP-) states "The numerical value always precedes the unit, and a space is always
used to separate the unit from the number. « The only exceptions to this rule are for the unit symbols for
degree, minute, and second for plane angle."a]

The case of letters (uppercase or lowercase) has meaning in the SI system, and case should never be
changed in a misguided attempt to follow an abbreviation style. For example, " 0 S" denotes 0 siemens (a
unit of conductance), while " 0 s" denotes 0 seconds. Any unit named after a person is denoted by a symbol
with 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, ha represent gram, litre, metre, second,
candela and hectare respectively. The one slight exception to this rule is that the symbol for litre is allowed to
be L to help avoid confusion with an upper case  or a one in some typefaces ² compare l, I, and .

Likewise, the abbreviations of the prefixes denoting powers of ten are case-sensitive: m (milli) represents a
thousandth, but - (mega) represents a million, so by inadvertent changes of case one may introduce (in this
example) an error of a factor of 000 000 000. When a unit is written in full, the whole unit is written in
lowercase, including the prefix: 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 denotes
millikelvin, -K denotes megakelvin, K.m denotes kelvin.metre, and km denotes kilometre. Forms such as k.m
and Km are ill-formed and technically meaningless in the SI system, although the intended meaning might be
inferred from the context.

aedit]Syllabic abbreviation

A á
iii

  is an abbreviation formed from (usually) initial syllables of several words, such
as )

= j  

+ à?
 . It is basically 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.

aedit]á


aedit]


 
á

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 organizations. For example, 8
 stands for D 
"?
(, or "secret state
police". Similarly, 
 stands for the
)


. This has caused syllabic abbreviations to
have negative connotation, notwithstanding that such abbreviations were used in Germany even before the
Nazis came to power, e.g., u  for u 
(
(.

Syllabic abbreviations were also typical for the German language used in the German Democratic Republic,
e.g. u
 for u

 
("state security", the secret police) or > for >

(
("people's
policeman").

East Asian languages whose writing uses Chinese-originated ideograms instead of an alphabet form
abbreviations similarly by using keycharacters from a term or phrase. For example, in Japanese the term for
the United Nations, % (
) is often abbreviated to (
). (Such abbreviations are
called ryakugo (` ) in Japanese). The syllabic abbreviation is frequently used for universities: for
instance, ?@ (¼ ) for ?'A2@$! (¼
, Peking University) and -% ( ) for -%%
 (
, University of Tokyo).

aedit]
 á

u
15


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 24u:;5B is used (in the full
capital form) to mean "Destroyer Squadron ," while;.5>):/5- would be "Commander, Naval Air
Force (in the) Atlantic."

aedit]See also
|

Abbreviation
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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An ii

  (from Latin &, meaning 

) 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 &
 can itself be represented by the abbreviation  , & or &

In strict analysis, abbreviations should not be confused with contractions or acronyms (including initialisms),
with which they share somesemantic and phonetic functions, though all three are connoted by the term
]:p 
"abbreviation" in loose parlance.a 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 either 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 (e.g. by the Council of Science Editors).

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aedit]History

u
1u 
&



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 can default.

An increase in literacy has, historically, sometimes spawned a trend toward abbreviation. The standardization
of English in the 5th through th centuries included such a growth in the use of abbreviation.a2] At first,
abbreviations were sometimes represented with various suspension signs, not only periods. For example,
specific phoneme sets like "er" were dropped from words and replaced with Â, like "mastÂ" instead of "master"
or exacÂbate instead of "exacerbate". While this seems trivial, it was symptomatic of an attempt by people
manually reproducing academic texts to reduce their copy time. An example from the Oxford University
Register, 503:
-ast subwarden y Âmēde me to you. And wher y wrot to you the last wyke that y trouyde itt good to differrÂ
thelection ov to quīdena tinitatis y have be thougħt me syn that itt woll be then a bowte mydsomÂ.

In the 30s 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 "Father of modern etymology" 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.a3]a4]

After World War II, the British greatly reduced their 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 organization of secret
agents called the "Special Operations, Executive" ² "S.O.,E" ² which is not found in histories written after
about
0.

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 
the last letter of its antecedent: "-." is the
abbreviation for "monsieur" while "-me" 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.a 

]

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 (U.S.), but not personal computer (PC) or television (TV).
-any British publications have gradually done away with the use of periods in abbreviations completely.

-inimization of punctuation in typewritten matter became economically desirable in the
0s and
0s for
the many users of carbon-filmribbons, 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

0s 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. S-S for instance supports message lengths of
0 characters at most (using the GS- 03.3 character set). This brevity gave rise to an informal abbreviation
scheme sometimes called Textese, with which 0% or more of the words in a typical S-S message are
abbreviated.a5] -ore recently Twitter, a popular social network service, began driving abbreviation use with 40
character message limits.
aedit]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 

 and to make this easier, publishers express their
preferences in a style guide. Questions which arise include those in the following subsections.

aedit]½


á



á
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.

aedit]

 á  á á
á 
á

A period (full stop) is sometimes written after an abbreviated word, but there are exceptions and a general lack
of consensus about when this should happen. There is some confusion over the strict distinction between an
abbreviation (a word shortened by omission of its  part) ² requiring a full point (or full stop or period) ²
and a contraction (a word or compound shortened by omission of a 
 part) ² which does not need a full
point or period. American English usage is less strict about this distinction and thus more likely to conclude a
contraction , e.g., 3 for "Junior" with a period.

In British English, according to Hart's Rules, the general rule is that abbreviations terminate with a full stop
]:p 
(period), whereas contractions do not.a

X
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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 writeG
u

, 4G, and G

5
 as G u , 4G, and G5 respectively.
A third standard removes the full stops from all abbreviations (both `u
` and `u

` become `u
`). The
U.S. -anual 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, `5
î

&`, `0 
3`, and `6427)58` all follow this recommendation.)

Acronyms that were originally capitalized (with or without periods) but have since entered the vocabulary as
generic words are no longer abbreviated with capital letters nor with any periods. Examples
are sonar, radar, lidar, laser, snafu, and scuba.

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, use only one period: The capital of the United States
is Washington, D.C.

aedit] 
 
á

To form the plural of an abbreviation, a number, or a capital letter used as a noun, simply add a lowercase  to
the end.

 A group of -Ps
 The roaring '20s
 -ind your Ps and Qs

To indicate the plural of the abbreviation of a unit of measure, the same form is used as in the singular.

 lb or 20 lb.

 ft or  ft.
 min or 45 min.

When an abbreviation contains more than one full point, ,

9:
 recommends to put the  after the final
one.

 Ph.D.s
 -.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
 -Phils
 the DTs. (This is the recommended form in the 5î;$2
0
4
.)

According to ,
9:
, 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 $s 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. -ost of these deal with writing and
publishing. A few longer abbreviations use this as well.

„


„
„
 „

  

„
„
 
  „„„


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aedit]3 
 á

i
 i  á

á 

á
aedit]

á

Publications based in the U.S. tend to follow the style guides of the Chicago -anual of Style and
the Associated Press.a& 
] TheU.S. Government follows a style guide published by the U.S.
Government Printing Office.

aedit]
  

-any British publications follow some of these guidelines in abbreviation:

 For the sake of convenience, many British publications, including the BBC and -8, have
completely done away with the use of full stops or periods in all abbreviations. These include:

 Social titles, like -s or -r (though these would usually not have had full stops ² see above) Capt,
Prof, 
<
 Two-letter abbreviations for countries (`Gu`, not `G u `);

 Abbreviations beyond three letters (full caps for all except initialisms);
 Words seldom abbreviated with lower case letters (`6:`, instead of `  `, or ``)

 Names (`0=
`, `8 0

`, `63u`). A notable exception is -4 
which
writes `. 0 =
`.
 Scientific units (see -easurement below).

 Acronyms are often referred to with only the first letter of the abbreviation capitalised. For instance,
the North Atlantic Treaty Organisationcan be abbreviated as `5
` or `5-;`, and Severe Acute
Respiratory Syndrome as `u` or `u:u` (compare with `
` which has made the full transition to an
English word and is rarely capitalised at all).

 Initialisms are always written in capitals; for example the ` 

  

` is abbreviated
to ` `, never `  `. 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 ( 00mph, 00m, 0cm,
0°C). (This is contrary to the SI standard, see below.)
aedit]-á

á


 

á

 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) 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.

for example PO for post office

aedit]-easurement

The International System of Units (SI) defines a set of base units, from which other "derived" units may be
obtained. The abbreviations, or more accurately "symbols" (using Roman letters, Greek letters in the case
of ohm and micro and other characters in the case of degrees celsius) for these units are also clearly defined
together with a set of prefixes for which there are also abbreviations or symbols. There should never be a
period after or inside a unit; both ' 0 k.m.' and ' 0 k.m' are wrong ² the only correct form is ' 0 km' (only
followed with a period when at the end of a sentence).

A period "within" a compound unit denotes multiplication of the base units on each side of it. Ideally, this period
should be raised to the centre of the line, but often it is not. 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 ² metre and second. However, the middle dot symbol (·, unicode U+00B, HT-L
&middot;) is the preferred way to represent compound units when available, e.g. "5 m·s".

There should always be a (non-breaking) space between the number and the unit ² '25 km' is correct, and
'25km' is incorrect. In Section 5.3.3. of -)


u
G
u), the International Bureau of
Weights and -easures (BIP-) states "The numerical value always precedes the unit, and a space is always
used to separate the unit from the number. « The only exceptions to this rule are for the unit symbols for
degree, minute, and second for plane angle."a]

The case of letters (uppercase or lowercase) has meaning in the SI system, and case should never be
changed in a misguided attempt to follow an abbreviation style. For example, " 0 S" denotes 0 siemens (a
unit of conductance), while " 0 s" denotes 0 seconds. Any unit named after a person is denoted by a symbol
with 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, ha represent gram, litre, metre, second,
candela and hectare respectively. The one slight exception to this rule is that the symbol for litre is allowed to
be L to help avoid confusion with an upper case  or a one in some typefaces ² compare l, I, and .

Likewise, the abbreviations of the prefixes denoting powers of ten are case-sensitive: m (milli) represents a
thousandth, but - (mega) represents a million, so by inadvertent changes of case one may introduce (in this
example) an error of a factor of 000 000 000. When a unit is written in full, the whole unit is written in
lowercase, including the prefix: 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 denotes
millikelvin, -K denotes megakelvin, K.m denotes kelvin.metre, and km denotes kilometre. Forms such as k.m
and Km are ill-formed and technically meaningless in the SI system, although the intended meaning might be
inferred from the context.

aedit]Syllabic abbreviation

A á
iii

  is an abbreviation formed from (usually) initial syllables of several words, such
as )

= j  

+ à?
 . It is basically 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.

aedit]á


aedit]


 
á

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 organizations. For example, 8
 stands for D 
"?
(, or "secret state
police". Similarly, 
 stands for the
)


. This has caused syllabic abbreviations to
have negative connotation, notwithstanding that such abbreviations were used in Germany even before the
Nazis came to power, e.g., u  for u 
(
(.

Syllabic abbreviations were also typical for the German language used in the German Democratic Republic,
e.g. u
 for u

 
("state security", the secret police) or > for >

(
("people's
policeman").

East Asian languages whose writing uses Chinese-originated ideograms instead of an alphabet form
abbreviations similarly by using keycharacters from a term or phrase. For example, in Japanese the term for
the United Nations, % (
) is often abbreviated to (
). (Such abbreviations are
called ryakugo (` ) in Japanese). The syllabic abbreviation is frequently used for universities: for
instance, ?@ (¼ ) for ?'A2@$! (¼
, Peking University) and -% ( ) for -%%
 (
, University of Tokyo).

aedit]
 á

u
15

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 24u:;5B is used (in the full
capital form) to mean "Destroyer Squadron ," while;.5>):/5- would be "Commander, Naval Air
Force (in the) Atlantic."

aedit]See also
|