If I was shortening someone's last name to only the first letter, but not doing it for the first name, would I put the dot after the last name or between the first name and the last name?
For example, is it John.C or John C.?
Learn English – put the period when I abbreviate someone’s name
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Related Solutions
Short answer: you can't. There is no reliable rule that will cover all the various languages and exceptions and parents who name their daughter Maxwell and their son Andrea.
Longer answer:
The bad news is, the -a vs. -o ending rule has so many exceptions that it's useless. Bella is female, but Bela (well, technically Béla) is male; Andrea is male in Italy but female elsewhere; Luca is male in Serbia but female in Hungary; Consuelo is female; etc.
The good news is, there are some tools you can use.
- Some European countries publish lists of names that can be registered on birth certificates. Most of those lists are gender-specific, as in parents are not allowed to choose a masculine name for their daughter or vice-versa. Thus, if you know what country a person is from, you can look up their lists of registerable names and figure out the person's gender.
- An image search can sometimes be useful: plug in the given name and check if the pictures that come up are mostly men or mostly women.
- There are baby-name sites (or books) and gender-guesser websites that will give a gender for given names. Make sure to check a couple of different sites, though, because some of them can be very wrong.
However, the bottom line is that even after all your best efforts and web searches, you simply will not be 100% correct, because Parents Are Crazy. And they're increasingly getting crazier - in the US, even traditional masculine mainstays like Charlie are starting to skew female. So the only foolproof method to determine a person's gender is to ask.
The letters MA ACA represent two distinct qualifications.
The abbreviation MA is used quite generally to indicate a Master's degree in any arts subject (i.e. any non-science subject). It is an abbreviation of the longer term Master of Arts. People often just put these two letters after their name to indicate they have a master's degree. If they want the reader to know the subject of their master's degree they can put that information in words after the abbreviation. So it would look something like this:
- Bob Smith MA Linguistics
The abbreviation used to indicate a master's degree in a science subject is usually MSc, short for Master of Science.
In the UK, if you pass the necessary exams and gain the necessary qualifications you will become a member of the Association of Chartered Accountants. At this point you are allowed to put the letters ACA after your name. This indicates that you are an Associate Chartered Accountant.
In English, it is common for people to list several qualifications after their name in formal documents. For example, a well qualified English language teacher might look something like this:
Bob Smith CELTA DELTA BA(hons) MA PHD
Best Answer
If you do use a period, it always goes after what is being abbreviated
However, a period is not always used, especially in BrE, and seems to get dropped from time to time in AmE, for example in addresses.
In your first example, putting the period before the "C" would result in
since the period is usually not a word delimiter in written English, otherwise it would be
which would be incorrect, however, there are times it might be formatted as
for contiguous abbreviations.
The famous example which breaks the rules is
Formatting the abbreviation as
looks more programming-ish, "C" is a method for object "John".