I discovered (probably many years later than I should have) an interesting developer lingo phenomenon – the Numeronym. Because they’re so tedious to spell out, lazy developers at DEC back in 1985 started shortening long frequently-used words by just keeping the first and last letters, and tossing in a number to represent the missing characters.

In this way Internationalization becomes i18n, Globalization becomes g11n – Wikipedia has a table of (mostly ‘-ization’ suffixed) words listed on their Numeronyms page.

It saves the writer time, but it doesn’t do much for the reader. A sentence composed of more than one Numeronym quickly degenerates into gobbledegook (g10k – “t1e q3k b3n f1x j3s o2r t1e l2y d1g“) – the word has to be so notably long and commonly used that you can’t mistake its meaning. On that note, I wonder what the odds are of finding alternate matches for a given numeronym? They’re probably exceedingly rare once you hit the high double-digits. That’d be a fun afternoon of puzzling.

A word of warning – stay away from that volcano in Iceland, or you may develop P45.