Abbreviations: periods or not?

Howdy everyone,

The tendancy is to get rid of periods in the middle of initialisms.

When an expression is shortened using the initials or a few letters, it's named initialism when they don't pronounce it as a word (for example eg, ie, NY, etc) or acronym when it's a pronounciable word (for example UNESCO, NATO, NASA, etc).

Decades ago, they were mandatorily written with a period between letters: N.S.W. for New South Wales, N.A.T.O. for North Atlantic Treatee Organization, U.N.E.S.C.O. for United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, etc.

Nowadays, probably due to room in computer memories, room on boards in airports, the abbreviations don't have periods any longer : NSW, NATO, UNESCO, EBRD for European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, ECG for electrocardiogram, electrocardiograph, ECSC for European Coal and Steel Community, EDD for estimated date of delivery, EEG for electroencephalogram, ETD for estimated time of departure, etc.
Sometimes the abbreviation is not exactly an initialism and there may be periods like in Ed.B for Bachelor of Education, PhD for Doctor of Philosophy, etc.

As far as I understand, etc doesn't have a period as we've in French (except at the end of a sentence).


As you know,
- acronyms tend to lose the capital letters to keep an initial cap only and sometimes not even the first letter as a cap. The acronym may also become a verb and even generate a full series of words.
- our society uses more and more initialisms/abbrevations/acronyms: good or not?

I like acronyms (a lot)
Who wants to say "United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization" when we can just say UNESCO !
And much easier to write OZ than Australia ! (but I suppose that isn't an acronym, but another sort of "ym" ?)

What's a "ym"?

LOLOLOL ...
A "ym" is another thing that isn't an acronym, like an antonym or synonym !
So what is it when we have another word in place of the true word ?
Australia = AUS = OZ
The OZ sounds exactly like AUS, but has different spelling.
Is it a homonym ? NO
Apparently, it is a heterograph, according to Mr Wiki ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homonym

Hi Krystyna,

Sorry! Got it now!

As for me AUS and Oz are "homophones" (not a gay making a call but a linguistic term) .