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An example of a backronym as a mnemonic is the Apgar score, used to assess the health of newborn babies.The rating system was devised by and named after Virginia Apgar.Ten years after the initial publication, the backronym APGAR was coined in the US as a mnemonic learning aid: appearance, pulse, grimace, activity, and respiration. [6]
The main discussion of these abbreviations in the context of drug prescriptions and other medical prescriptions is at List of abbreviations used in medical prescriptions. Some of these abbreviations are best not used, as marked and explained here.
The opposite of the diminutive form is the augmentative. In some contexts, diminutives are also employed in a pejorative sense to denote that someone or something is weak or childish. For example, one of the last Western Roman emperors was Romulus Augustus , but his name was diminutivized to "Romulus Augustulus" to express his powerlessness.
Abbreviation. An abbreviation is a way to shorten a phrase. Many common abbreviations tend to shorten the word being referenced by literally shortening the word but not creating a new one. Here ...
(Temperatures tend to follow the older usage; −5° is generally called "minus five degrees".) [18] Further, a few textbooks in the United States encourage −x to be read as "the opposite of x" or "the additive inverse of x"—to avoid giving the impression that −x is necessarily negative (since x itself may already be negative). [19]
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 trailing period. For example: etc. is the usual abbreviation for et cetera.
Grammatical abbreviations are generally written in full or small caps to visually distinguish them from the translations of lexical words. For instance, capital or small-cap PAST (frequently abbreviated to PST) glosses a grammatical past-tense morpheme, while lower-case 'past' would be a literal translation of a word with that meaning.
Common terms were abbreviated too, such as writing just "F" for filius, meaning "son", a very common part of memorial inscriptions mentioning people. Grammatical markers were abbreviated or left out entirely if they could be inferred from the rest of the text. So-called nomina sacra ('sacred names') were used in many Greek biblical manuscripts.