Abbreviation

1. n. One dash, or more, through the stem of a note, dividing it respectively into quavers, semiquavers, or demi-semiquavers.
2. n. The act of shortening, or reducing.
3. n. The result of abbreviating; an abridgment.
4. n. The form to which a word or phrase is reduced by contraction and omission; a letter or letters, standing for a word or phrase of which they are a part; as, Gen. for Genesis; U.S.A. for United States of America.

The word meanings were obtained from OPTED(The Online Plain Text English Dictionary), which is based on “The Project Gutenberg Etext of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary” which is in turn based on the 1913 US Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (See Project Gutenburg), as a text file.