Abbreviations and Acronims between Language and Orthography

The fast way of life necessarily has repercussions on all aspects of life, including the language, and then, indirectly, the letter. It is understandable that the authors of various texts in print media are trying to save time and space. Therefore, a significant increase of shortening words is evident. Abbreviations and acronims are caused by shortening words or by omitting some letters. There are two types of shortening words: abbreviations, that arise by taking the first letter or the first few letters of one word, and acronyms, that are formed from multiword lexem by taking initial letters or groups of letters. The paper reexamines the descriptions and definitions of abbreviations and acronims in Croatian ortography manuals and reshearches their word formation, morphology, sintactic rules, taking under consideration their lexical status in dictionaries. The research is based on a corpora of Croatian ortography manuals, Croatian monolingual dictionaries and electronic corpus Croatian Language Repository of Institute of Croatian language and linguistics