And "a11y" is the most obscure -- dare I say... inaccessible -- fucking abbreviation of "accessibility". For years I only saw them in passing and assumed both these things were like, quirkily-named Javascript frameworks or niche standards documents or something, despite knowing quite well the concepts they actually refer to.
this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2026
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And l10n for localization.
I learned that one from the first sentence of the article!
Ah, sorry, I didn't click on the link 😅
a11y lmao
Minorities usually refer as allies (singular "ally") to people who support their needs even if they are not part of the minority.
Yeah, some folks even say "ally" with their mouth, when they're talking about accessibility/a11y...
And a terrible way to abbreviate things, IMHO.
I2O
Kubernetes has one too, K8s
oh shit
IS THAT WHY! I had wondered what the 8 was for but never looked it up.
The important part where this scheme came from:
According to Tex Texin, the first numeronym of this kind was "S12n", the electronic mail account name given to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) employee Jan Scherpenhuizen by a system administrator because his surname was too long to be an account name. The use of such numeronyms became part of DEC corporate culture.[3]
So it was a technical limitation gotten corporate naming scheme.
hehe, hui
Am I having a stroke? This and all the comments seem to make zero sense.
It's an abbreviation scheme which represents a word as its first and last letters, and a number to indicate the count of letters in the middle which are missing.
"Internationalisation" = 20 characters long, so becomes "i18n"
Thank you so much! I was questioning my sanity for a bit.
Well f2k me, T1L, t4s!
This makes me wonder if there's a h33a abbreviation...
h33a
Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia is a humorously artificially extended word for "fear of/aversion to long words"
One of my friends got a penicillin IV at the hospital, and the machine shortened it to "PENI5".
I have to highlight the best part about this, because it's hilarious: apparently, the first numeronym was "S12n", the email username of Jan Scherpenhuizen, because his actual name exceeded the character limit (this was back in the 80s).