George A. Cochran  age 11. from Willliamsports, PA

Why do we abbreviate?

You can usually recognize a long word from its shorts abbreviated form. You can tell at a glance what Jan  Feb. and Oct. stand for. You know the full names of the states from these abbreviations. No Ys‑  Calif. Okla. But a few abbreviations are puzzlers. They have in them letters that just do not appear in the long versions of the words.

Whoever did the abbreviations for our weights seems to have wanted to puzzle us most. We have lb for pound and oz for ounce. Well  as Andy told you some weeks ago  lb was abbreviated from a Latin word for weight.. The word was libras in which case the lb abbreviation makes sense. The short form for ounce came to us by way of the Spanish language.

Originally the word ounce meant one twelfth. Nowadays of course' it is one sixteenth of a pound. The Spanish had a word meaning one sixteenth of a weight. It was onza. And  somehow. our word ounces became abbreviated by way of the Spanish word onza„ Oz makes sense as a short way of writing onzas. You may use oz to mean ounce or ounces. You may use ozs for‑ ounces if you wish. You need not put a period after this abbreviation.