List of medieval Latin abbreviations

This article lists brachygraphic Latin abbreviations used in the medieval period. Abbreviations were also used earlier in classical Latin, however this is considered in a separate list, as well as contemporary Latin abbreviations in current usage.

Introduction

Abbreviations were introduced to early writing to speed up the transcription of spoken word and the writing of letters in business contexts, as well as to save space for monumental epigraphy. In classical Latin, the system of shorthand developed by Tiro was said to involve substitution, whereas the Roman legal tradition used suspension and later Christian writers used contraction.

Publication History

The first major work on Latin abbreviations was published by Alphonse Chassant in 1846, who listed some 5000 individual abbreviated headwords. Charles Trice Martin produced a list of abbreviated Latin words found in English records as an appendix to the 9th edition of Wright's Court Hand Restored in 1879; this was developed into a full independent work The Record Interpreter in 1892, listing some 8600 abbreviated Latin headwords.

A major contribution came in 1899 with Adriano Cappelli's Lexicon Abbreviaturarum; this received updates by the author until the final Cappelli edition in 1929, however the work has been recently updated an republished in its 7th edition (2011). In 1982, Heimann and Kay published The Elements of Abbreviation in Medieval Latin Paleography, an English translation of Cappelli's introductory essay on abbreviation from his 1899 work.

A crowdsourced project by the University of Zurich in 2015 digitised Cappelli's dictionary into an online searchable database of 14,357 headwords.

List of Medieval Latin Abbreviations

This is an incomplete list Latin abbreviations taken from medieval European documents, primarily focusing on Italy, from the 1929 edition of the Lexicon Abbreviaturarum via the University of Zurich's dataset; in total Capelli listed 14,357 headwords, so only about 10% are reproduced here.