Abbreviations and acronyms

Abbreviations are shortened forms of words or phrases that represent longer, frequently used words or phrases. They're used to conserve space, effort, and time.

Basics

• If you’re unsure whether your audience will understand an acronym or abbreviation, spell out the words followed by the acronym in parentheses the first time it’s used in text. You can use the acronym only from then on.
• Capitalize the spelled-out acronyms only if they contain proper nouns like product names, team names, or company names.
• Always abbreviate units of measurement unless otherwise specified.
• Wherever possible, spell out common words, like "average," instead of abbreviating them.
• If you have to abbreviate a common word:
  • Avoid using the abbreviation at the beginning of a sentence.
  • Add a period after the abbreviation.
• Spell out thousand, million, billion, trillion unless space is extremely tight. If you have to abbreviate them, use capital letters and no space: 30K, 30M, 30B, 30T.
• Don't use apostrophes to make acronyms plural: "ABCs" not "ABC's". See Plurals page.

Units of time

Spell out all units wherever possible.

If space is too limited, use the following standard abbreviations: