List of common abbreviations and acronyms (NOAD, ESL, PIE...)

Question

Abbreviations are always a potential source of confusion. Some people might happen to know what OED stands for, and can figure out what NOAD must mean, but others may not be so lucky. Googling for PIE is rather useless even for native speakers, and completely perplexing to non-native ones.

Thus, let us compile (and maintain) a list of common abbreviations.

Answer 1

• AAVE — African-American Vernacular English
• AE, AmE — American English
• AHD — American Heritage Dictionary
• BE, BrE — British English
• BNC — British National Corpus
• CGEL — Cambridge Grammar of the English Language
• COCA — Corpus of Contemporary American English
• COHA — Corpus of Historical American English
• ESL — English as a second language
• IPA — International Phonetic Alphabet
• MW, M-W — Merriam-Webster
• MWDEU — Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage
• NNS — Non-native speaker
• NOAD — New Oxford American Dictionary
• OALD — Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (now Oxford Learner's Dictionaries)
• ODO — Oxford Dictionaries Online (now "Oxford Living Dictionaries")
• OE — Old English
• OED — Oxford English Dictionary
• OLD — Oxford Learner's Dictionaries [NB: Oxford Living Dictionaries should use the former abbreviation ODO (q.v.)]
• PIE — Proto-Indo-European
• RP — Received Pronunciation
• TFD — The Free Dictionary

The following is a list of abbreviations common to all sites of the Stack Exchange network:

• CW — community wiki; a post "owned" by the entire community rather than just the OP
• EL&U, ELU — short for "English Language and Usage", the name of this site
• ELL — English Language Learners, another Stack Exchange site for questions from those learning English, where answers may be couched in didactic terms more familiar to learners
• GR or Gen Ref — General Reference, meaning that the question can be easily answered using a dictionary, thesaurus, or other easily-found resources; can be a reason for closing a question
• HNQ — Hot Network Question on Stack Exchange
• LMGTFY — Let Me Google That For You
• MSE — Meta Stack Exchange, the discussion site for the entire SE network
• MSO — Meta Stack Overflow (also meta.SO), the discussion site associated with SO, which was used for SE network-wide discussions, bugs and feature requests before new Meta Stack Exchange was started
• NARQ — Not A Real Question, a former close reason on the network for questions which are often overly broad or simply facetious
• OP — original poster (the author of a given question) or original post
• OQ — original question, as opposed to follow-up questions, subsequent edits, or tangential discussion
• OT — off-topic
• POB — primarily opinion-based
• SE — Stack Exchange, our growing network of question-and-answer sites on diverse topics from software programming to cooking to photography and gaming
• SO — Stack Overflow, the programming question-and-answer site with which it all began
• TPTB — The Powers That Be, the team that runs all the sites, as opposed to "mere mortals" such as regular users and moderators alike

The following is a list of abbreviations specific to the culture here on EL&U:

• GAFTAD — Get A Fine Thesaurus; Also Dictionary.
• IANAL — I Am Not A Linguist [NB In general on SE this stands for I Am Not A Lawyer]

Some conventions:

• *X
  • for language history and etymologies, it means X is form or word which has no written attestation in the language considered and is therefore reconstructed. This can be either because the language itself is not attested in writing (e.g., all Proto-Germanic words) or because the particular word happens to be unattested, though it is hypothesised to have existed.
  • for current language use, it means the utterance is ungrammatical/wrong (in the variety considered).
• ?X means that X is a marginally grammatical utterance (could follow the letter of a rule, but sounds a little wrong, or nobody would actually say it that way).
• /X/ is the phonemic representation of a word in a given variety. X should be in IPA.
• [X] is the phonetic representation of a word in a given variety. X should be in IPA.

Common abbreviations for parts of speech and syntactic functions:

• A — adjective
• adj — adjective
• AdjP — adjective phrase
• adv — adverb
• AdvP — adverb phrase
• AP — adjective phrase
• art — article
• aux — auxiliary verb
• AuxP — auxiliary verb phrase
• C — complementizer
• conj — conjunction
• D — determiner
• det — determiner
• DO — direct object
• DP — determiner phrase
• interj — interjection
• IO — indirect object
• N — noun
• neg — negator
• nom — nominal
• NP — noun phrase
• obj — object
• P — preposition
• PP — prepositional phrase
• pred — predicate
• prep — preposition
• pron — pronoun
• Q — quantifier
• S — sentence or subject
• subj — subject
• V — verb
• VP — verb phrase