Group Actions
Engagement
  • Author Author: jw0752
  • Date Created: Date Created
  • Views 1602 views
  • Likes 6 likes
  • Comments 26 comments
Related
Recommended

Acronyms Initialisms Abbreviations and Variables

jw0752

       A while back I started a list of abbreviations and acronyms that were being used in the questions and discussions on the E-14 web site. Since I often found myself not able to understand the context of the sentence until I googled the particular sequence of letters I felt that others might be having the same problem. My initial list was entered in the forum a couple months ago and has been viewed over 2000 times. I promised in the initial publication that I would update the list on the forum from time to time. Here is the updated list at this time. If anyone has suggestions for additional entries or if I have gotten any of the below listed wrong please let me know.                  

 

I have attached an Xcel .xlsx file for the list below in case you want to save it and make your own up dates.

 

 

John

 

This post was updated 6/9/16 JCW

 

 

8/20/2017

I have attached the latest list of Electronic Initialisms and Acronyms for those who are interested. There are about 750 entries in the list at this time.

John

Attachments:
Electronics Initialisms.xlsxElectronics Initialisms.xlsx
Parents

  • nice list

    BNC should be Bayonet Neill Concelman

    I was always told it was a Baby N Connector, but that was wrong.

    See my upcoming road test for more on this ....

  • in reply to dougw

    Bayonet Neill Concelman

    You mean it's not B..y Nice Connector   image

     

    Strangley the discussion about acronyms and multiple meanings is reminding me of when I first started at work.

    We had a manager who seemed to enjoy showing his 'superior' placing by using acronyms we hadn't come across.

    You'd get this look if you interrupted his weekly staff meeting to ask what it meant.

    After a period we started trying the same trick on him, and the practice stopped not long afterwards.

     

    When I joined Airways, I was overwhelmed at the number I struck and asked someone if there was a list.

    If I recall it got to 4 pages of A4, and it wasn't complete.

     

    It highlighted we had a number of multiples within the same organisation and meaning different things depending on what department.

    So yes they are nice, but need to be treated with care as pointed out.

     

     

    Mark

  • in reply to jw0752

    >One thing that I have noticed is that there has been a tendency to initially spell them out when they are first used in a post.

     

    That is how I was taught to write articles when I was in High School. It's generally rude to assume your audience knows all the abbreviations.

     

    Here's hoping the trend continues! image

  • in reply to ntewinkel

    I've just soldered some 100n(nano)F(Farad) capacitors onto a board.

     

    Is that how you would do it?

  • in reply to jc2048

    Interesting discussion! For that (or most) scenarios, possibly something like 100 nano farad (nF) should be used, e.g. always expand first and then show the abbreviation.

    I'm not great at it, I do try to almost always spell it out at least once (sometimes more often) in a single article, but some things like nF and Hz and so on I don't expand, although for a perfect article I think it should be expanded. Sometimes I'll go back and edit in the expansions if I've been writing too quickly and forgotten to expand. Personally I think it reads much cleaner with less abbreviations, but others might prefer more abbreviations to speed-read. It is an interesting topic, because when learning engineering, we were taught clarity was things like not using 'l' for variable names, and so on, but I don't recall any classes on how to handle abbreviations and yet they occur so often in engineering.

    Also, slightly related, you've probably already seen them, there are some interesting style guides, the Economist one is a popular one, but other papers have them too, and they make fascinating reading. Sometimes their styles don't agree with each other, e.g. I think Economist says to always write 'billion' and not abbreviate to 'bn' whereas another style guide says the abbreviation is fine. I suppose where a blog post differs slightly is that we are always available to clarify stuff in the comments or revise posts, whereas that is harder with traditionally print article journalism.

  • in reply to jc2048

    LOL*! AFAIK* YMMV*. 100n*F* cap* on PCB*

     

    *LOL = laughing out loud

    *AFAIK = As far as I know

    *YMMV = Your milage may vary

    etc etc*

     

    *etc = etcetera  image*

     

    * image denotes not being fully serious

  • in reply to ntewinkel

    Ps, it *really* bothers me when articles use some kind of acronym, take the effort to star* it, and then there is no corresponding lookup line to explain the starred acronym! (or the lookup line is somewhere completely obscure)

Comment Children
No Data