English dictionaries provide the legal hyphenation pattern for a word, eg. ap . prox . i . mate, usually in bold face. This does not necessarily correspond to the syllables of the word (these are typically given in the international pronunciation) e.g. Oxford English Dictionary (OED).
We will use the syllables of a word to create abbreviations for names which are too long in Darwin. The convention is as follows:
When names are abbreviated in Darwin, we use the first syllable of a word according to the OED. If this abbreviation is either (1) too short for uniqueness, (2) unaesthetic or (3) extremely unpronounceable, the second syllable of the word is added. Subsequent syllables are added until problems (1) - (3) disappear.
There are small number of computer and biological abbreviations common to both literatures. These abbreviations do not follow the above principle but may be used throughout the system and the onus lies on the user's shoulders to identify their meanings. In general, this list should be kept as small as possible. There is a delicate balance between the advantages of having short names in the system and the disadvantages of having too many abbreviations.
Abbreviations from Computer Science:
| abbreviation | description |
| DB | database |
| eval | evaluate |
| int | Integer |
| IPC | Inter-process communication |
| LS | Least Squares |
| Svd | Singular value decomposition |
| TSP | Travelling salesman problem |
| UTC | Universal time coordinated (Greenwich time) |
Abbreviations from Biology are:
| abbreviation | description |
| A | Amino acid (single letter code) |
| AAA | Amino acid (3-letter code) |
| AC | Accession number, (used by SwissProt database) |
| Amino | Amino acid (fully spelled) |
| B | Base part of nucleotide, (one letter code) |
| Base | Base part of nucleotide, (fully spelled) |
| BBB | Base part of nucleotide, (3-letter code) |
| CInt | an integer between 1 and 64 identifying a codon (3 bases) |
| Codon | 3 bases in a single string, eg. "ACT" |
| DM | Dayhoff matrix |
| DNA | deoxyribonucleic acid, (A,C,G or T) |
| ID | Identification number, (used by SwissProt database) |
| MSA | Multiple Sequence Alignment |
| NP | Nucleotide-peptide |
| PAM | Point accepted mutations, a measure of distance |
| Pep | Peptide (amino acid) |
| RNA | ribonucleic acid, (A,C,G or U) |
| Sim | Similarity score |
| tRNA | transfer-RNA a molecule translating codons to peptides |