Noun

abbreviation (plural abbreviations)

1. A shortened or contracted form of a word or phrase, used to represent the whole: Dr.
2. The act or result of shortening or reducing.
3. (music) One or more dashes through the stem of a note, dividing it respectively into quavers, semiquavers, demi-semiquavers, or hemi-demi-semiquavers.
4. (mathematics) Reduction to lower terms, as a fraction.

An abbreviation (from Latin brevis, meaning short) is a shortened form of a word or phrase. Usually, but not always, it consists of a letter or group of letters taken from the word or phrase. For example, the word abbreviation can itself be represented by the abbreviation abbr., abbrv. or abbrev.

In strict analysis, abbreviations should not be confused with contractions or acronyms (including initialisms), with which they share some semantic and phonetic functions, though all three are connoted by the term "abbreviation" in loose parlance.An abbreviation is a shortening by any method; a contraction is a reduction of size by the drawing together of the parts. A contraction of a word is made by omitting certain letters or syllables and bringing together the first and last letters or elements; an abbreviation may be made either by omitting certain portions from the interior or by cutting off a part; a contraction is an abbreviation, but an abbreviation is not necessarily a contraction. However, normally acronyms are regarded as a subgroup of abbreviations (e.g. by the Council of Science Editors).