Words You Never Realized Were Abbreviations

Some abbreviations are obvious — you type “lol” instead of “laughing out loud,” for example, and use “Tbsp.,” “tsp.,” and “c.” in a recipe that calls for tablespoons, teaspoons, and cups. You might even know the difference between acronyms (abbreviations that are said as a word, such as NASA) and initialisms (abbreviations pronounced with individual letters, such as FBI). But there are many more sneaky abbreviations hiding in your everyday speech. 

Can you find all 18 abbreviations in this story about Sally’s day off?

Now read the same story with the common abbreviations spelled out:

The function of an abbreviation is to reduce any word to its essence. Technically, it’s shrinking a word to its morpheme, the smallest unit of meaning, for efficiency. Let’s explain some of the most common hidden abbreviations. 

The word “typographical” hearkens back to the early days of the printing press, in the 16th century. The abbreviated “typo” was coined in the 19th century — back then, each printed page was built from tiny metal letters set by hand, backward and line by line, then locked in place, inked, and pressed onto paper. “Typo” referred to when the typesetter made an error in their placement, and the abbreviation has persisted ever since, now applying to mistakes made by any writer using a keyboard.  

 This recent coinage, popular among Gen Z and Gen Alpha, is short for “charisma.” The versatile “rizz” can be used as a noun (“she’s got rizz”) or a verb (“to rizz up” a person by using charisma to attract them), with variants including the comparative “rizzier.”

 We use smartphone apps for a million things a day, usually without realizing that “app” is short for “application.” In the context of computers, the abbreviation originated in the 1970s, when it referred to an application program, which is software developed to solve a specific user problem. “App” was popularized in 1985 when Apple launched the MacApp, and it further spread in 2008 when Apple launched the App Store.

The etymology of the word reflects the function of a bus, which is to enable anyone to hitch a ride on it. “Bus” comes from the Latin “omnibus,” the dative plural of “omnis,” meaning “all.” The abbreviation is short for the French voiture omnibus, a carriage for all.

In 18th-century London, a light horse-drawn carriage was a cabriolet, colloquially known as a cab.  “Cabriolet” is ultimately from the Latin “capreolus,” meaning “wild goat” — appropriate because it had springy suspensions. “Cab” first applied to transportation for hire at the end of the 19th century. The related “taxi” is short for “taximeter cab,” introduced in London in 1907, from the Latin “taxa,” meaning “tax, charge.”

The German word “Delikatessen,” a plural of “Delikatesse,” means “delicacy, fine food.” The shortened “deli” became common in America in the mid-1900s, shortly after World War II. Delis were especially popular in big cities such as New York, which were influenced by Jewish immigrant culture.

Submarine sandwiches became popular around the mid-20th century, so named because of their submarine-like appearance. One theory is that they originated in New London, Connecticut, during World War II, when workers at a local Navy shipyard popularized “submarine” to describe the sandwich shaped like the ships they were working on.