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A contraction is a shortened version of the spoken and written forms of a word, syllable, or word group, created by omission of internal letters and sounds.. In linguistic analysis, contractions should not be confused with crasis, abbreviations and initialisms (including acronyms), with which they share some semantic and phonetic functions, though all three are connoted by the term ...
Some acronyms are formed by contraction; these are covered at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Abbreviations. Some trademarks (e.g. Nabisco) and titles of published works (e.g. “Ain't That a Shame”) consist of or contain contractions; these are covered at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Trademarks and Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Titles, respectively.
Poetic contractions are contractions of words found in poetry but not commonly used in everyday modern English. Also known as elision or syncope , these contractions are usually used to lower the number of syllables in a particular word in order to adhere to the meter of a composition. [ 1 ]
For example, the opening line of Catullus 3 is Lugete, O Veneres Cupidinesque, but would be read as Lugeto Veneres Cupidinesque (audio). [13] There are many examples of poetic contraction in English verse of past centuries marked by spelling and punctuation. Frequently found examples are over > o'er and ever > e'er.
Example of 15th-century Latin manuscript text with scribal abbreviations. An abbreviation (from Latin brevis, meaning "short" [1]) is a shortened form of a word or phrase, by any method including shortening, contraction, initialism (which includes acronym) or crasis. An abbreviation may be a shortened form of a word, usually ended with a ...
Note that some words contain an ae which may not be written æ because the etymology is not from the Greek -αι-or Latin -ae-diphthongs. These include: In instances of aer (starting or within a word) when it makes the sound IPA [ɛə]/[eə] (air). Comes from the Latin āër, Greek ἀήρ. When ae makes the diphthong / eɪ / (lay) or / aɪ ...
Clipping is also different from back-formation, which proceeds by (pseudo-)morpheme rather than segment, and where the new word may differ in sense and word class from its source. [2] In English, clipping may extend to contraction, which mostly involves the elision of a vowel that is replaced by an apostrophe in writing.
The two main reasons for contractions are to make speaking quicker and to make writing quicker. Since changing "right" to "rt" only removes 3 characters, whilst changing "Honorable" to "Hon" removes 7, the correct course of action might be to classify "Honorable"=>"Hon" as a valid contraction, but "Right"=>"Rt" as invalid.