Even if 2025 were a leap year, February would still be our shortest month.

In honor of that abridged timespan, Webb’s Weird Words herewith presents a look at shortened words. For our purposes here, we won’t cover abbreviations, of which we have thousands — nearly all requiring periods and/or capital letters (a.m., NASA, B.C., LOL, etc.).

In this piece, we’ll focus instead on shortening that actually produces another word — like ad, gas or doc, for instance.

Those three exemplify the most common type of shortening; it is aptly called a clip — because the end of the word gets clipped off.

Many of these are obvious: limo, amp, lab, mic, memo, vet (both kinds!), ex (as in ex-wife) and pub (from public house).

Some require a spell-change — like vibe, fave, fax and comfy; there’s even one that blends two clips for a popular modern beauty treatment: manipedi. And if you’ll forgive the pun: Another cool one is fridge, which clips off one prefix and two suffixes!

Others are less intuitive: Cad (a rude, boorish male) is short for caddie, which used to mean any kind of servant or oddjobber. Pep is from pepper, blitz from the German blitzkrieg — and the stage term prop is short for property.

In some way that I can’t pin down, school settings generate a ton of these: lav, caf, prof, gym, aud, exam and prom (from promenade) — not to mention many course-names: math, bio, chem, trig, calc, psych, econ … perhaps even sosh for sociology.

I don’t know — maybe students are too busy (or too lazy?) to bother with all the extra syllables.

In any case, there’s another — and weirder — shortening process called back formation. To keep it simple, this means that certain words like escalate and burgle were NOT the basis for escalator and burglar, but vice versa: They actually emerged later, or as it were, backwards — again by clipping off the suffix. Other surprising instances include emote, enthuse, laze, respirate, spectate and even pea, from the now-archaic pease (as in “pease porridge hot,” etc.).

Getting even weirder: Two similar processes named with Greek words are aphesis and apheresis. In contrast to what we’ve discussed above, these shortenings remove something from the start of a word — for instance, copter, phone and quake, along with the slangy ’cuz and ’shrooms. Cab is perhaps our most extreme form of shortening; as an abridgement of taxicab, its original opener is already short for taximeter (the device that calculates fares); and even cab itself is a clip of the once-popular horse-drawn carriage called a cabriolet.

Some of these front-clipped terms are more surprising: bus (omnibus), van (caravan), varsity (university), wig (periwig) and both types of gin; the drink is short for juniper (from which it derives), and the “gin” in cotton gin comes from engine.

Then there are outliers like plosive, scend and sorb; plus a handful of others that sound shortened but actually preceded their longer cousins: plash, plenish, suasion and whelm.

And to finish (if you’re still with me!), here are two of our oddest shortening quirks:

With apheresis, a shorter version often becomes so standard that it eclipses its linguistic forebear; in some cases, we’re not even aware of the relation between them. The least-known of these is perhaps down, which once was “adown,” and earlier “adune” — related of course, to dune.

More common instances: (ac)count, (a)cute, (al)most, (a)mend, (de)spite, (e)squire, (e)state and of course (o)possum.

And finally, something we covered briefly in Weird Words more than a year ago:

English has a handful of words whose spelling changed due to the a/an distinction before the sound of a consonant (“a cat”) or vowel (“an apple”). Our words adder, apron, auger and umpire all used to start with “N” (nadder, napron, nauger, noumpere). But if, for example, you keep saying “a napron” — pretty soon you can’t tell where the N-sound is; so through mishearing, it moved off the noun and onto the preceding article (“an apron,” etc.).

Conversely, this has likewise happened in the opposite direction — with newt, which used to be ewt; and nickname, which used to be ekename (“eke” being an obsolete synonym for “also”). But these last two, of course, are technically not shortening.

I guess that’s a whole nother subject.