How do I spell the truncation 'Cas', as in 'Sports Casual/Sports Cas'? It may be UK only, and may have been spawned by Alan Partridge. Cash/Cas are not right.
*As in a slang term, "he was acting all cas".
Learn English – How to spell the truncation ‘Cas’, as in ‘Sports Casual/Sports Cas’
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Best Answer
This slang contraction appears to be too new for most dictionaries or Google NGrams. Since it's slang and new, I took at look at social networking and the web for ideas. More commonly used forms often lead to standard forms over time, all else being equal.
Urban Dictionary lists both cas and cazh, the former having more votes there.
Google Searches reveal that "cas dress" (6,000+ hits for me) is found much more often than "cazh dress" (50+ hits for me). "dress cas" is actually quite common, with 130,000+ hits for me compared to only 60 for "dress cazh".
Twitter Search shows that cazh is used, mostly by people asking how to abbreviate 'casual'. A cas search has far too many unrelated results to judge. "cas dress" has only 4 hits and "dress cas" only 1 applicable, but "cazh dress/dress cazh" and "cash dress/dress cash" have no related results.
Finally, a Google search of Facebook shows that "cas dress/dress cas" has a few hits (41 & 13 for me) but "cazh dress/dress cazh" have none.
I also did Twitter and Facebook searches for "sports cas" and "sports cazh" but there were no related results in either case.
Based on social networking results, I'd say that there is still no common way to spell this abbreviation - but if pressed, 'cas' seems to be slightly more common than 'cazh'. It seems that more people simply abbreviate the existing word "casual" than try for a slightly obscure phonetic spelling.