When colleagues were talking about improving “accessibility” of our software, I saw them write “a11y” and wondered what crazy thing this was. It turns out it is a “numeronym” which is like an abbreviation, but really dumb.
What you do is keep the first and last letter, then any letter you remove between those, you count them, and put the number there instead. So there are 11 letters removed from the word “accessibility” so it becomes “a11y”. I also came across i18n (internationalisation), and K8s (Kubernetes).
This website has more information: https://a11yproject.com/posts/a11y-and-other-numeronyms/
I’d never really thought about what the W3 in “W3Schools” meant. Seems these stupid abbreviations have been around for years but haven’t really took off until recently.
Stranger Coding Tings 