Abbreviations in English Military Terminology

In this work, the corpus of military abbreaviations taken from Bowyer's Dictionary of Military Terms (3rd edition) is examined. The analysis of the corpus is done in two steps ; first the relevant definitions and classifications of abbreviations are identified and then the abbreviations are analysed according to their linguistic features. The first part examines several works of authors who dealt with the classifications of abbreviations. The work provides a short history of abbreviations in general-purpose and specific dictionaries with the topic of military and naval terminology. The analysis of abbreviations on three levels is also provided, namely, orthographic, morphological and semantic level. The orthographic one gives the distribution of abbreviations into their respective categories, the morphological level deals with the ways of their formation, and the semantic level deals with the relation between the meaning of abbreaviation's constituents and the meaning of the abbreviation as a whole.