What Are Abbreviations Used For?
FBI, GIF, Zip, Radar, UN, WHO. These are some terms that are very commonly used in the world. They are part of casual conversations. These are not actual words but shortened versions of a phrase or a long name. FBI is a shortened version of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; GIF is a shortened version of graphics interchange format. These are all abbreviations, and these help saving time in writing and helps people keep their conversations brief and concise. Abbreviations are shortened versions of a word. Squeezing your writeups in a limited space and increasing the readability of a sentence high can be done using abbreviations. There are four different types of abbreviations: initialism, acronyms, shortening, and contractions. Initialism is the practice of forming a word using the first letter of a group of words. In this case, each letter is pronounced individually. Some examples include the FBI, ASAP, CD, UFO, USA, VAT, CEO, and many others. Then there are acronyms that are formed using the first letters of the words, but they are pronounced as a word itself. Some examples of acronyms include NASA, NATO, PIN, ZIP, VAT, and several others. The third type of abbreviation is shortenings. These are abbreviations in which either the beginning or the end is omitted. Advertisement is often written as an ad, application as app, influenza as flu, blog as a weblog. Not all shortenings can be used in verbal conversations. Shortenings such as Feb, Sat, etc., and many others. The fourth type of abbreviation is contractions. These are the ones where the middle of a word is omitted. Some examples include Dr, govt, St, Mr. Other forms of contractions are where the apostrophe is used to represent the missing letters. Some examples include he’s, they’d, I’ve and several others.
Grammatical Considerations
In dictionaries, abbreviations are often used for parts of speech and other grammatical terms. Do you know what the common abbreviations below mean? Write the meaning of each abbreviation on the line.
Uses in Writing
We start learning about some commonly used forms in real world writing. You might see these in letters or greeting cards.
