Abbreviation

When initialism is used as the preferred term, acronym refers more specifically to when the abbreviation is pronounced as a word rather than as separate letters; examples include SWAT and NASA.

Initialisms, contractions and crasis share some semantic and phonetic functions, and are connected by the term abbreviation in loose parlance.

[2]: p167 In early times, abbreviations may have been common due to the effort involved in writing (many inscriptions were carved in stone) or to provide secrecy via obfuscation.

(For example, ⟨A⟩ can be an abbreviation for many words, such as ager, amicus, annus, as, Aulus, Aurelius, aurum, and avus.

Manuscripts of copies of the Old English poem Beowulf used many abbreviations, for example the Tironian et (⁊) or & for and, and y for since, so that "not much space is wasted".

While this may seem trivial, it was symptomatic of an attempt by people manually reproducing academic texts to reduce the copy time.

And wherɔ y wrot to you the last wyke that y trouyde itt good to differrɔ thelectionɔ ovɔ to quīdenaɔ tinitatis y have be thougħt me synɔ that itt woll be thenɔ a bowte mydsomɔ.In the Early Modern English period, between the 15th and 17th centuries, the thorn Þ was used for th, as in Þe ('the').

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.

Widespread use of electronic communication through mobile phones and the Internet during the 1990s led to a marked rise in colloquial abbreviation.

[10] More recently Twitter, a popular social networking service, began driving abbreviation use with 140 character message limits.

For example, "DVDs" and "URLs" and "Ph.D.'s", while the Modern Language Association[15] explicitly says, "do not use an apostrophe to form the plural of an abbreviation".

However, the 1999 style guide for The New York Times states that the addition of an apostrophe is necessary when pluralizing all abbreviations, preferring "PC's, TV's and VCR's".

However, the apostrophe can be dispensed with if the items are set in italics or quotes: 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.

The manual also defines the way in which units should be written, the principal rules being: A syllabic abbreviation is usually formed from the initial syllables of several words, such as Interpol = International + police.

This usage has spread into other American cities, giving SoMa, San Francisco (South of Market) and LoDo, Denver (Lower Downtown), amongst others.

Partially syllabic abbreviations are preferred by the US Navy, as they increase 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", while COMNAVAIRLANT would be "Commander, Naval Air Force (in the) Atlantic".

Syllabic abbreviations are a prominent feature of Newspeak, the fictional language of George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The contractions in Newspeak are supposed to have a political function by virtue of their abbreviated structure itself: nice sounding and easily pronounceable, their purpose is to mask all ideological content from the speaker.

Syllabic abbreviations were and are common in German; much like acronyms in English, they have a distinctly modern connotation, although contrary to popular belief, many date back to before 1933, if not the end of the Great War.

With the National Socialist German Workers' Party gaining power came a frenzy of government reorganisation, and with it a series of entirely new syllabic abbreviations.

The new order of the German Democratic Republic in the east brought about a conscious denazification, but also a repudiation of earlier turns of phrase in favour of neologisms such as Stasi for Staatssicherheit ("state security", the secret police) and VoPo for Volkspolizei.

Syllabic abbreviations are common in Spanish; examples abound in organization names such as Pemex for Petróleos Mexicanos ("Mexican Petroleums") or Fonafifo for Fondo Nacional de Financimiento Forestal (National Forestry Financing Fund).

In Southeast Asian languages, especially in Malay languages, abbreviations are common; examples include Petronas (for Petroliam Nasional, "National Petroleum"), its Indonesian equivalent Pertamina (from its original name Perusahaan Pertambangan Minyak dan Gas Bumi Negara, "State Oil and Natural Gas Mining Company"), and Kemenhub (from Kementerian Perhubungan, "Ministry of Transportation").

For example, in Japanese the term for the United Nations, kokusai rengō (国際連合) is often abbreviated to kokuren (国連).