These are most commonly first letters of the words in a phrase, such as TMI that stands for too much information. Many abbreviations appeared at the end of the 20th century when people started sending each other text messages. Examples are BTWfor by the way and RSVP for répondez s’il vous plaît. It’s also common that first letters of the words in a phrase are used instead of a whole phrase. A single word can also be shortened by taking only the first and the last letter, e.g. that stands for limited, or Revd that stands for Reverend. Some abbreviations take the most important letters of the word, such as Ltd.
One option is representing the word by its first letter or by the first few letters, e.g. It’s natural to shorten all the words that can be shortened, to make sure that everything you want to say fits into a single tweet.Ībbreviations can take various forms, and there isn’t a rule that would strictly define how words can or can’t be shortened. For instance, Twitter doesn’t allow tweets to be longer than 280 characters. In addition, in the modern world, there sometimes is the need to fit as much information as possible into one message while having a limited amount of characters. Obviously, it takes a lot less effort to write SARS than it would if you were to write “Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome”, the whole phrase that it stands for. The reason why abbreviations have been popular hundreds of years ago and why they still remain so today is that they help us save space and time.
Beowulf, an Old English epic poem from some time around the tenth century, is only one example of works that had shortened forms of words in them. As for the English language, it’s been full of abbreviations from the very beginning. In fact, in ancient Greece and Rome, it was common to shorten words by their first letter.
All of these are abbreviations.Įven though it might seem that abbreviations are a rather modern phenomenon that exploded due to technology and text messages, they’ve actually been around for thousands of years. For example, it’s common to come across an “etc.” or “i.e.” in an essay and an “OMG” or “FYI” in a text message you receive from a friend. Both in formal and informal speech, we don’t always write the whole word or phrase and use a shortened form instead.
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