The Canadian Style
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Chapters
- - Close Abbreviations
- Introduction to Abbreviations
- General guidelines and observations
- Periods
- Plurals
- Capital letters and hyphens
- Titles used with personal names
- Military abbreviations
- University degrees, professional designations, military decorations, honours, awards and memberships
- Geographical names
- Addresses: streets and buildings; points of the compass
- Latitude and longitude
- Parts of a book or document
- Latin terms
- Scientific and technical terms
- Corporate names
- Acronyms and initialisms
- Number and percentage symbols
- Ampersand
- Monetary units
- Months and days
- Time of day and elapsed time
- Time zones
- The International System of Units (SI)
- The imperial system
- Business terms, expressions and symbols
- + Hyphenation: Compounding and Word Division
- + Spelling
- + Capitalization
- + Numerical Expressions
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- + Elimination of Stereotyping in Written Communications
- + Geographical Names
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- - Close Abbreviations
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1.03 Periods
In recent years there has been a trend toward the omission of periods in abbreviations. This is particularly true of scientific and technical writing, but the practice has been spreading in general writing as well.
(a) Do not use periods with the following:
- chemical symbols and mathematical abbreviations: H2O, NaCl, cos, log, tan;
- SI symbols and units: cm, kg, L (see 1.23 The International System of Units);
- abbreviations for points of the compass: winds NNW
(Exception: In street addresses that are not on an envelope or package, use periods with compass point abbreviations: King St. E.); - the military rank abbreviations used in the Department of National Defence (see 1.07 Military abbreviations);
- short forms of words: lab, flu, vet, stereo, typo; abbreviations or acronyms consisting exclusively of upper-case letters or ending in an upper-case letter (except those for personal names, legal references and most place names), e.g. NAFTA, PhD, YMCA, UN, GST, MiG, CTV.
(b) Use periods
- with geographical abbreviations, e.g. B.C., P.E.I., but not for the two-character symbols recommended by Canada Post (see 1.09 Geographical names).
- with most lower-case abbreviations, including a.m., p.m., e.g., i.e. (mph is one of the few exceptions).
- at the end of abbreviations for single words: Mr., Jr., Ltd., misc., pp., Nos.
- after each abbreviated word of a multiword term or phrase, where the abbreviation of each word consists of more than single initials, e.g. Rev. ed., Rt. Rev. (space required after each element in the abbreviation).
- after initials in a person’s name:
- Thelonius S. Monk
- H. E. Hughes
(space required between each period and the following initial or name)
Periods, Note
If a sentence ends in an abbreviation taking a period, only one period is used.
For further information on spacing, see 7.02 Spacing.
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