i want to find the individual who first determined the best way to abbreviate internationalization as i18n and beat the crap out of them.
Why? Well, depending on where you go, you'll discover v12n, i10n, a12n and a general plethora of letter+digits+'n' combinations that are far less scrutable than the original word they're supposed to replace.
Consider the source "internationalization", consisting of "inter-", "nation", "-al", "-ize" "-ation" or "the process of becoming related to being between nations". One could also drop a few adjective suffixes and use "make international" or "multi-language" since that's about it.
So why the i18n? Well, turns out that English, American and French all share a word that meets that form. Not really "multi-national" so much as "bi-lingual", considering that in German it'd be "i12g", Greeks would use "δ10η", and Japanese would probably use "国1化" so the very act of making i18n requires replacing "i18n" with a different phrase.
What's worse is that "i18n" doesn't really define anything to folks that, you know, don't speak the language and are looking for what the hell it means. "Inat" does a better job, being both nicely terse and providing the first few phonemes of the word it's trying to replace.
Personally, i'd only use the alphanumeric abbreviation format for curse words. Words that really ought to be obscured lest they corrupt the children, not because some f5g stupid m11g b6d with s2t for brains thinks he's so g8n clever that creating a c9g lossy run length encoding schema for polysyllabic words is r7d w5g u12g g7d f10c brilliant.
At least i18n is significantly shorter, unlike y2k which saved us a whole one symbol and no syllables. As far as I can tell, the battle is already lost.
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Rumor has it that IBM is at fault. They really set the standard.
PS: Without that-bastard-Unicode, we'd have to worry about this a whole lot less.