Reducing word length

Charles Abbott

01 Dec 2025 — 1 min read

If you do a lot of texting on your iPhone or iPad, you appreciate that typing long words is irritating but also sometimes necessary for clear communications.

It’s human nature to look for shortcuts and the desire to reduce word length is no exception. Compiling lists of standard and/or widely used abbreviations is a small subset of what linguists do but there’s not much out there on how to create a new useful abbreviation that I could find. I confess that I was educated to be an engineer, not a linguist, but the creative challenge has charged my battery.

The best resource I have found are books entitled “Forkner Shorthand” by Hansen D Forkner Ph.D. and “Comprehensive Forkner Shorthand Dictionary “ by Frances A. Brow. The first book was copyrighted in 1968 the second in 1982. Both books are my “go to“ gold standards.

Combinations of vowels

ae ea ai ia ao oa au ua ay ya ei ie eo oe eu ue ey ye io oi iu ui iy yi ou uo oy yo My suspicion is that if any of these combinations occurs in a syllable of a word, one letter has a fair chance

Double Vowels

We already know that it is safe to drop one letter of double consonants but what about double vowels “a”, “e”, “i”, “o” and “u”? We learned in an earlier post that “oo” has the “u” sound and is written with a ”u”. I scanned the list of words output

Double Consonants

When a word contains double consonants, is it always safe to delete one letter? I did a deep dive into this topic by using a word finder tool to generate and examine a list of common words for every possible double consonant. I concluded the answer is yes with a

Sounds of “c”

If the letter “c” has a hard sound, it is written. However , if “c” has a soft sound like the letter “s”, just substitute the letter “s”. This commonly occurs when a word ends in “ce”. For example, words like face, race and nice can be shortened to fas, ras

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Combinations of vowels

Double Vowels

Double Consonants

Sounds of “c”