Why "No." is the short form for NUMBER ?

Answer 1

snoopy l has the basics -- The word is the first and LAST letter of the Latin form "numero", which is the "ablative case" form of the word, meaning "in number"

It is also true, as some note, that abbreviations are often enough formed by the first letter + some other besides the second letter, esp. using the LAST letter, as with "Mr" (mister) or "vb" (verb), though also sometimes another distinctive letter ( e.g., "mt" for "mountain").

But note that in all of these cases the abbreviations use letters from the word's English ROOT word, not some changeable ending. And it's not just that the abbreviation is of a Latin word (English nouns, of course, do not HAVE case endings!) There are many abbreviations of Latin words used in English (and other languages) which do not include case endings. So why is THIS abbreviation formed this way?

The point was that this abbreviation stems:

a) from a time when scholars WROTE in Latin, so case endings would be used throughout the writing

b) from a word used in sentences where it could be IMPORTANT to know exactly how the word was being used, that is, its "case"

As another has noticed (though apparently misunderstood), in its original form "no." had a raised ("superscript"), underlined "o". This special treatment was used to clearly indicate that this "o" WAS a case ending, and not part of the root word.


(Related note -- the practice of abbreviating a word by its first letter or two plus the case ending, usually raised, is ancient. For example, in the early church --by the 2nd century-- copies of the Greek New Testament would abbreviate the divine names by using the first letter or two followed by the case ending, with a line over the whole to mark it as an abbreviation.)
http://www.skypoint.com/~waltzmn/NominaSacra.html

Answer 2

Numbers Abbreviation

Answer 3

short form number

Answer 4

The abbreviation No is from the Italian word 'numero', for number. The word is familiar for English language users in expressions such as Numero Uno (number one). 'No' isn't the only abbreviation used to denote the word 'number'. N, Nr and n° are other popular abbreviations, not to forget the 'hash' symbol '#'. There are other examples of the English language adopting abbreviations with their etymologycal roots in a foreign language, like 'Lb', short for 'Libra' that means a scale but stands for 'Libra Pondo' or simply 'Pound'.

Answer 5

"No." comes from abbreviation of the Latin "numero". This question was asked and answered on YA! a couple months back:

http://ca.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070611000712AAzBjYV

But I found more on the matter at a page from the Random House website, the link seems expired but the cached page link is below.

"Numero" is a special case of the Latin word "numerus" (meaning number) -- this case makes it mean "in number", which is the context in which the abbreviation is used. Thus, the abbreviation must be "No." and not "Nu." because the meaning in Latin is "numero", not "numerus".

So glad you asked, so now I know. Never did before...

Answer 6

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Nr is the short form for "near".

Answer 7

Numero Sign

Answer 8

I am not sure at all but I came up with something. It might be related to the French word "Numero" which means "Number" because the first and last letters are "No."

It could also be from a different language. I don't know.

Answer 9

The "no" abbreviation for "Number" comes from Romance languages, such as French where "Nombre" means number.

Actually, the pound sign (#) is shorter and more often used in International serial numbers and technical specifications.

Answer 10

As others have said, no. comes from Latin. It's commonly used in the UK as an abbreviation for 'number', whereas in the USA it's usually # (the pound sign).