abbreviation

1460, from M.Fr. abréviation, from L.L. abbreviationem (nom. abbreviatio), from pp. of abbreviare “make brief,” from L. ad “to” + breviare “shorten,” from brevis “short, low, little, shallow” (see brief (adj.)).

Interesting though…a lot of words that mean “to shorten” are quite long and/or big (as in million-dollar) vocabulary words, and I’m not sure that many of them have ‘official’ abbreviations.

Examples: Truncated, abridged, curtail, diminish, retrench, condense, summarize, synopsize, etc.

I think people just like coming up with complicated ways to say simple s***.