Imagine a world where everything we said had a word or character limit on it. We wouldn’t stop talking, we would just develop our own language and our own system of abbreviations. This is, of course, exactly what has happened with social media but with the overspill of internet abbreviations for business into general job parlance, it pays to keep ahead of internet jargon and internet contractions. To help you avoid getting your UV mixed up with your UI or, IMHO worse still, your UTI, we have some of the key internet abbreviations for business (plus a few entertaining extras FYI) DFTBA!!

NBD – No Big Deal (as in, ‘It doesn’t really matter’ as opposed to, ‘I didn’t get the sale’.)

FYI – For Your Information (also translated as, ‘You had better read this or else!’)

CTA – Call To Action. Kind of like an old-fashioned bugle call but no battles here, just instructions at the end of a piece of text on how to spend your money!

FIFO – No giants or fee-fi-fo-fum here, just an inventory phrase meaning First In First Out or, ‘Use the old ones first’.

101 – Basic Knowledge. For example a blog post such as this might be an Internet Abbreviations 101

HTH – Happy To Help. Almost certainly even when you aren’t!

B2B and B2C – Business to Business or Business to Consumer. Quite simple really, you are a business and you (hopefully) either sell things to other businesses or you sell them to consumers (customers).

ROI – Nothing to do with French kings, Return On Investment is all about money.

OOO – Not necessarily on Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but this one does mean Out Of Office, so who knows!

THx – A lazy way of saying thank you but more acceptable than, ‘Ta’.

NRN – No Reply Necessary. You could read this two ways, either the sender is being considerate or you are expected to resist argument!

MTFBWY – If you are a Star Wars fan you will get this one straight away, if, like me, you are not, you will never want to use it anyway.

MTWTFSS – I will leave you to work this one out yourself… my favourite are the last two!

G2G