History:Style/Titles/Abbreviations

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Abbreviation is strictly a shortening, but more particularly, an abbreviation is a letter or group of letters, taken from a word or words, and employed to represent them for the sake of brevity.

Abbreviations should generally be expanded, particularly in Extra Title Information. The main exceptions are “feat.” for “featuring” when describing additional artists (see featured artists), and “vs.” for “versus” which is a type of artist collaboration.

Acronyms such as “OST” should not be expanded.

As usual, artist intent may override this guideline (see the style principles).

Rationale

Abbreviations can be ambiguous, and by that we mean that one single abbreviation can mean several different words when expanded. This issue becomes very important when dealing with multi‐lingual words; for example, the word “Volume” and “Volumen” are both abbreviated to “Vol.” and there is no way to tell which expansion is correct without doing further research. As we intend to support other languages in future, we should make entries as unambiguous as possible for easy manipulation at a later date.