List of common abbreviations (NOAD, ESL, PIE…)

Question

Abbreviations are always a potential source of confusion. Some people might happen to know what OED stands for, and can figure out what NOAD must mean, but others may not be so lucky. Googling for PIE is rather useless even for native speakers, and completely perplexing to non-native ones.

Thus, let us compile (and maintain) a list of common abbreviations.

Answer 1

• AAVE — African-American Vernacular English
• AE, AmE — American English
• AHD — American Heritage Dictionary
• BE, BrE — British English
• BNC — British National Corpus
• CGEL — Cambridge Grammar of the English Language
• COCA — Corpus of Contemporary American English
• COHA — Corpus of Historical American English
• ESL — English as a second language
• IPA — International Phonetic Alphabet
• MW — Merriam-Webster
• MWDEU — Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage
• NNS — Non-native speaker
• NOAD — New Oxford American Dictionary
• OALD — Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary
• OE — Old English
• OED — Oxford English Dictionary
• ODO - Oxford Dictionaries Online
• PIE — Proto-Indo-European
• RP — Received Pronunciation

The following is a list of abbreviations common to all sites of the StackExchange network:

• OP — original poster; the author of a given question
• CW — community wiki; a post "owned" by the entire community rather than just the OP
• OT — off-topic
• EL&U, ELU — short for "English Language and Usage", the name of this site
• ELL - English Language Learners, a place (under construction) for questions not sophisticated enough for EL&U
• SE — StackExchange, our growing network of question-and-answer sites on diverse topics from software programming to cooking to photography and gaming
• SO — StackOverflow, the programming question-and-answer site with which it all began
• MSO — Meta StackOverflow, the "meta meta" site of the network, for discussing meta topics that affect all its sites
• TPTB — The Powers That Be, the team that runs all the sites, as opposed to "mere mortals" such as regular users and moderators alike
• LMGTFY — Let Me Google That For You
• NARQ — Not A Real Question, a close reason on the network for questions which are often overly broad

The following is a list of abbreviations specific to the culture here on EL&U:

• GAFTAD — Get A Fine Thesaurus; Also Dictionary.
• IANAL — I Am Not A Linguist

Some conventions:

• *X
  • for language history and etymologies, it means X is a reconstructed word but has no known record.
  • for current language use, it means the utterance is ungrammatical/wrong (in the variety considered).
• ?X means that X is a marginally grammatical utterance (could follow the letter of a rule, but sounds a little wrong, or nobody would actually say it that way).
• /X/ is the phonemic representation of a word in a given variety. X should be in IPA.
• [X] is the phonetic representation of a word in a given variety. X should be in IPA.