Nik Cubrilovic

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Numeronym

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i18n is a popular abbreviation for ‘Internationalization’. It is abbreviated by taking the first and last letters and replacing all the characters in the middle with the number of characters replaced. l10n is the abbreviation for localization. I am not sure if a lot of developers who are familiar with the terms understand the origins, but apparently this style of abbreviation is referred to as a Numeronym.

There is some history about them on Wikipedia. Numeronym’s also include words such as ‘K9’, where the number is pronounced as part of the word.

They have become more popular recently in the startup community and in blogs because the venture capital firm Andressen Horowitz has their internet home at the domain a16z.com.

Numeronym’s are easy to parse in Python, and there are a dozen ways to do it. I had added a numeronym(word) method to my utils library, for what reason, I do not know.

I am now ‘nik c8c’.

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