Numeronym Generator (i18n, a11y)

A numeronym replaces the middle of a word with the count of letters it stands for, keeping the first and last. The examples everyone knows come from software: internationalization becomes i18n, accessibility a11y, localization l10n, observability o11y, Kubernetes k8s. Paste any text and every word at or above the length you choose is shortened this way, with numbers, punctuation and shorter words left alone and the outer letters keeping their original case.

The convention is usually traced to Digital Equipment Corporation in the 1980s, where an employee named Jan Scherpenhuizen was given the username S12n because the full name would not fit the system's limit. The habit spread through the company and then through the industry, which is why the surviving examples are all the sort of long Latinate nouns that software documentation is full of.

The form has one unexpectedly elegant property. Internationalization and internationalisation are both twenty letters, so both compress to i18n — an abbreviation that sidesteps a spelling argument that has otherwise followed the industry around for decades.

It also has a collision problem that is easy to miss. The scheme encodes only a length and two letters, so different words with the same shape land on the same abbreviation: accessibility and applicability are both thirteen letters starting with a and ending with y, and both are a11y. In practice the context disambiguates, which is another way of saying the abbreviation carries less information than it appears to and only works inside a community that already knows which word was meant. There is also a well-noted irony in the most common example: a screen reader announces a11y as "a eleven y", so the standard shorthand for accessibility is the one word on the page that a blind reader cannot resolve. Worth using in a slug or a channel name, worth spelling out in prose.