English Café: Abbreviations

Advanced Details: Abbreviations

An abbreviation is a short form of a word or phrase. All of the short forms that you see below ↓ are abbreviations:

Dr.–Co.–Ltd.–c.o.d.–NASA–laser–let’s–DVD–radar–a.s.a.p.–etc.–FAQ–HTML

There are four main types of abbreviation, and the way that we write, punctuate, and pronounce any abbreviation depends largely on its type, but we should all attempt to reduce our amount of punctuation (full stops, commas, etc.)

• shortening
• continued → cont.
• contraction
• Doctor → Dr.
• initialism
• British Broadcasting Corporation → BBC
• standard operating procedure → SOP
• acronym
• subscriber identification module → sim
• personal identification number → PIN

Modern technical and business English reduces the amount of punctuation necessary:

• US, not U.S. (Best: USA)
• MA, not M.A.