Graham King - Abbreviations (Collins Word Power)

Perhaps without our realising it, abbreviations and their smart cousins, acronyms, have become essential elements in our language and lives.

Unthinkingly, we use dozens, perhaps hundreds of them every day: BBC, BO, DJ, DIY, PDQ, M&S ft, ins, lbs, ozs, kilos. Many of them have been in use so long we forget the actual words, phrases or names they represent: RSVP, QED, APC, BUPA.

Others, of more recent invention, hide fearsome medical terms we prefer to put out of our minds anyway, like Aids, BSE, TSS and CJD.

Acronyms where the initials of a phrase or saying form a meaningful or pronounceable word can be even more hermetic. How many of us would score ten out of ten for reciting correctly the full meanings of Oxfam, radar, scuba, Saga, Qantas, laser and Wasp? Or even Nimby, Serps, Miras and Tessa, which entered the language only a few years ago? Names of people, too, are abbreviated; you are forgiven if you dont know that RLS is the famous 19th century writer Robert Louis Stevenson, but how about GBS, FDR, JFK and JCB? Or Rab and Ranji?

Then of course there are those hundreds of work-horse abbreviations that save us so much time: mph, Herts, hippo, ie, nb, IOU, pm and so on. No problem here, because from an early age we learn how to recognise and use them. But there are hundreds more, those on the fringes of our lives that we see or use only occasionally, that were not too sure about. Explaining the meaning of these seemingly unintelligible cutdowns is the real purpose of Collins Wordpower: Concise Dictionary of Abbreviations and Acronyms, and several thousand of them are listed here, mainly those that might cross the paths of the average citizen.

There are an estimated half a million abbreviations presently at large around the globe, so it might seem that this collection is but a drop in the linguistic ocean. But is your life likely to be bent out of shape by not knowing that AAPP is the Association of Amusement Park Proprietors, or that the ADMM is the Association of Dandy Roll and Mould Makers, or that behind the ABRRM lurks the Association of British Reclaimed Rubber Manufacturers? Or, if you are of a bucolic disposition, that ehm means eggs per hen per month? We think not, but if you disagree we will happily point you towards either Dr John Paxtons Penguin Dictionary of Abbreviations or the exhaustive Oxford Dictionary of Abbreviations.

The fact is, many abbreviations break into our lives and then, in time, pass out again, surviving only in erudite compilations such as the above. Will people, in a decade or two, know or care that TGIF means Thank God its Friday, or that DINK means double income, no kids, any more than we know or care today that phren means phrenology and OSw means Old Swedish? Meanwhile, though, it probably pays to know the difference between el al and El Al, and you would drop a rather large brick if, at a social gathering, you confused a D&B with a D&C.

One final point, or period. All the abbreviations in this dictionary are printed without periods. Although this is a widespread trend, and one which avoids typographical fussiness while only on the rarest of occasions causing any ambiguity, you should know that the practice is not without its critics.