Most Used Abbreviations in English

When you start living in an English speaking country you realize that abbreviations are very common, at the beginning it seems a bit weird as in other languages they are not that common, but then you see their potential because they save a fairly amount of time.

Next is shown a list with the most used abbreviations in English. These abbreviations are sorted alphabetically and presented in a table with three columns: the actual abbreviation, its meaning in English and an example to see the context where it’s used.

Table 1: English Abbreviations

Abrev.	Meaning	Example of use
AFAIK	As Far As I Know	AFAIK there is no problem at all
AKA	Also Known As	She’s Victoria Beckham, also known as Posh
ASAP	As Soon As Possible	This needs to be done asap
BBL	Be Back Later	Now you have to wait, he’ll BBL
BRB	Be Right Back	One sec, I’ll BRB
BTW	By The Way	That’s really good news. BTW, she also finishes her studies
COB	Close Of Business	We need to finish this requirement by COB
DIY	Do It Yourself	If you want anything to happen you have to DIY!
FYI	For Your Information	Commonly used in the emails and when you forward a message to another person. FYI, original message
IDK	I Don’t Know	I’m sorry, IDK
IMO	In My Opinion	IMO, you’re wrong
LOL	Lots Of Laughs	Lol, that was really funny
NIM	Not In the Mood	I’m NIM to go out tonight
NP	No Problem	No problem at all, it was my pleasure
OMG	Oh My God	OMG! Isn’t that Cristiano Ronaldo?
TBA	To Be Announced	Prize for the winner is TBA!
TBC	To Be Confirmed	That is still TBC
TBD	To Be Defined	The room is yet TBD
UFO	Unidentified Flying Object	He believes he saw an UFO last night
VIP	Very Important Person	That’s the VIP area for the club
WTF	What the f**k?	WTF are you talking about man?

Do you know any other that is not mentioned above?

Halloween is coming…

But, what is Halloween exactly?
Halloween (also spelled Hallowe'en) is an annual holiday celebrated on October 31. This holiday has origins in the ancient Gaelic festival known as Samhain (pronounced sow-in or sau-an), which is derived from Old Irish and means roughly "summer's end".

The celebration has some elements of a festival of the dead. The ancient Gaels believed that the border between this world and the Otherworld became thin on Samhain, allowing spirits (both harmless and harmful) to pass through.

Why do children say "trick or treat"?
Trick-or-treating is a customary celebration for children on Halloween. Children go in costume from house to house, asking for treats such as candy or sometimes money, with the question, "Trick or treat?" The word "trick" refers to a (mostly idle) threat to perform mischief on the homeowners or their property if no treat is given. In some parts of Ireland and Scotland children still go guising. In this custom the child performs some sort of show, i.e. sings a song or tells a ghost story, in order to earn their treats.

To finish, some recommended videos from YouTube:

Classic video from Disney with the Donald Duck – Trick or Treat:



Link to video1 in YouTube

This is Halloween, the song from the Nightmare before Christmas movie:



Link to video2 in YouTube

The previous song with subtitles in English:



Link to video3 in YouTube

Happy Halloween!

References:
Information on the Wikipedia
Image in the post

Think in English, turn your email into English!

There are many ways for keeping your English alive, some of them require dedication or time consuming tasks but you can also do small things that can help you to keep in touch with the language. For instance, as simple as setting up your PC desktop's environment to English will make you think in English, so every time you copy a file, set a new device, install an application or turn your computer off you'll be interacting with your system...in English!

You can also change the language of your applications so every time you use your browser, copy-and-paste something or write a document in your word processor you'll be doing it in English. This also applies to sites where language settings can be changed, like Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail. As an example, let's see how to set up your Gmail account in English.

1. Go to Gmail and click on “Configuración”:



2. On “Idioma” select English (US) or English (UK):



3. Save your settings clicking on “Guardar los cambios”:



4. Now, your Gmail account is in English!



At the beginning it could be a little tough because you might be used to how things are written in Spanish, but after a while you'll find yourself working as you would do it with your PC set in Spanish.

You can even extend this idea to your cell phone, so every time you write a SMS or make a call, you'll be using what you've learned in English!!

Guest post from Luis M. Gallardo, you can visit his blog about Linux, Programming, Videogames and many other topics. Luis also collaborates in the planeta consolas blog.

Great video - Mr Duncan Channel Promo

There is no doubt that Mister Duncan is one of the best online English teachers; his videos are very creative and educational.

We’d like to share with you one of the latest videos that he has made (in order to promote his free channel on YouTube) that is simply wonderful.

In this video Mister Duncan shows off his big creativity and through a rhyme introduces you to his channel for learning English on YouTube:



Link to the video on YouTube

Every video in his channel is subtitled so it’s easier to understand them.

Don’t miss his channel on YouTube

Help! I can’t find a word in the English dictionary!

There are occasions when we look for a word in the English dictionary and we don’t find it. There are several reasons for this: the dictionary hasn’t been updated, the dictionary is based on British English but the word belongs to American English (or vice versa), the word we’re looking for has been misspelt, the word doesn’t exist, etcetera.

Today we’re going to examine the process that we can follow when something like this happens. We’ll be using as an example the expression “Tinker’s cuss” (one of the Strange English Words mentioned in this post).

The steps to follow could be structured as:

1. Make sure that the word is spelt right (we’ve copied it properly from the original text where we saw it).

2. Start the search in some free online dictionary. Let’s kick off with WordReference.com (not that we want to say that it’s the best, but it’s among the best and its forum is really useful). After searching “Tinker’s cuss” in WordReference.com we get No translation found for 'Tinker’s cuss' but interestingly there is an entry for “give a tinker’s cuss” in the WordReference.com forum that give us a definition for this expression.

3. Problem solved. However, let’s imagine that there was no entry in the WordReference.com forum; we still wouldn’t know the meaning of the word. We can try with another good online dictionary; in this case we make use of TheFreeDictionary. The result that we get after searching is Phrase not found in the Dictionary and Encyclopedia. Please try the words separately. But if we look beneath, there are some articles related to our search; specifically the one related to “give a tinker’s cuss” is the one that give us the right definition.

4. Problem solved again; well done WordReference.com and TheFreeDictionary! However, let’s imagine again that we haven’t found the word nor something related to it in the two previous dictionaries. We could keep looking in other dictionaries individually or change the strategy and use the online translators (google translate, Yahoo! Babel fish …) If we don’t want to visit all of them individually, we can make use of an online resource that allows us to search in all of them at the same time: Jollo is the website that we need. After searching “Tinker’s cuss” in Jollo the truth is that the results are pretty bad and we don’t find a valid translation.

5. Don’t panic! We still have a very powerful resource remaining: google. We can look for “Tinker’s cuss” in google and immediately get a result. The way of looking for it is by including the double quotes at the beginning and the end of the term “Tinker’s cuss”, so we’re telling google that we’re looking for those words in that specific order. The results that we get are linked to online dictionaries (TheFreeDictionary, Wiktionary, Dictionary.com, Urbandictionary or WordReference.com) that’ll give us what we’re looking for.

6. If in step number 5 google tells you an answer like Did you mean...? then have a look at the options that google suggests and if any of them convinces you and you can’t find related entries for the word or sentence that you’re looking for then it could be that the word doesn’t really exist. Good luck anyway!