Both in formal and informal speech, we don’t always write the whole word or phrase and use a shortened form instead. For example, it’s common to come across an “etc.” or “i.e.” in an essay and an “OMG” or “FYI” in a text message you receive from a friend. All of these are abbreviations.

Even though it might seem that abbreviations are a rather modern phenomenon that exploded due to technology and text messages, they’ve actually been around for thousands of years. In fact, in ancient Greece and Rome, it was common to shorten words by their first letter. As for the English language, it’s been full of abbreviations from the very beginning. Beowulf, an Old English epic poem from some time around the tenth century, is only one example of works that had shortened forms of words in them.