or ABBREVIATURE, a contraction of a word or passage; made by dropping some of the letters, or by substituting certain marks or characters in their place.—Lawyers, physicians, &c. use abundance of abbreviations, partly for the sake of expedition, and partly for that of mystery; but of all people the Rabbins are the most remarkable for this practice, so that their writings are unintelligible without the Hebrew abbreviations. The Jewish authors and copyists do not content themselves with abbreviating words like the Greeks and Latins, by retrenching some of the letters or syllables; they frequently take away all but the initial letters. They even frequently take the initials of several succeeding words, join them together, and, adding vowels to them, make a sort of barbarous word, representative of all those which they have thus abridged. Thus, Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, in their abbreviation is Rambam, &c.