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It may be placed after an initial letter used to abbreviate a word. It is often placed after each individual letter in acronyms and initialisms (e.g., "U.S."). However, the use of full stops after letters in an initialism or acronym is declining, and many of these without punctuation have become accepted norms (e.g., "UK" and "NATO").
A period (a.k.a. full stop) is sometimes used to signify abbreviation, but opinion is divided as to when and if this convention is best practice. According to Hart's Rules, a word shortened by dropping letters from the end terminates with a period, whereas a word shorted by dropping letters from the middle does not.
A shortening is an abbreviation formed by removing at least the last letter of a word (e.g. etc. and rhino), and sometimes also containing letters not present in the full form (e.g. bike). As a general rule, use a full point after a shortening that only exists in writing (e.g. etc. ) but not for a shortening that is used in speech (e.g. rhino ).
The next three words come after Aster because their fourth letter (the first one that differs) is r, which comes after e (the fourth letter of Aster) in the alphabet. Those words themselves are ordered based on their sixth letters (l, n and p respectively). Then comes At, which differs from the preceding words in the second letter (t comes ...
Acronyms are often spelled with the initial letter of each word in all caps with no punctuation. For some, an initialism [ 1 ] or alphabetism , connotes this general meaning, and an acronym is a subset with a narrower definition: an acronym is pronounced as a word rather than as a sequence of letters.
The Style manual for authors, editors and printers (6th edn, 2002), [14] sponsored by the Australian Government, stipulates that only one space is used after "sentence-closing punctuation", and that "Programs for word processing and desktop publishing offer more sophisticated, variable spacing, so this practice of double spacing is now avoided ...
On Wikipedia, most acronyms are written in all capital letters (such as NATO, BBC, and JPEG).Wikipedia does not follow the practice of distinguishing between acronyms and initialisms; unless that is their common name, do not write word acronyms, that are pronounced as if they were words, with an initial capital letter only, e.g., do not write UNESCO as Unesco, or NASA as Nasa.
A historiated initial (the letter O) from an illuminated manuscript. In a written or published work, an initial [a] is a letter at the beginning of a word, a chapter, or a paragraph that is larger than the rest of the text. The word is ultimately derived from the Latin initiālis, which means of the beginning.