Some most important English abbreviations and story behind them

Some most important English abbreviations and story behind them

e.g. - exempli gratia
This is an abbreviation of the latin term given above. I suppose quite a few of you must already know this. The "exempli" means "of example" once you take the tense/voice into account. The "gratia" means "for the sake". So the whole term means "for the sake of example", which we conveniently shorten to "for example".

i.e. id est, "in other words" or "that is", again in Latin. Many people confuse i.e. and e.g. You must take a look at the difference between the two

i.e. vs e.g.

O.K.
Etymology - Of unclear origin. Wikipedia lists several possibilities. It may be an abbreviation of a comical spelling of "All Correct" as "Oll Korrect", such as first appeared in print in The Boston Morning Post on March 23, 1839, as part of a fad for similar fanciful abbreviations in the United States during the late 1830s.

etc. - et cetera
Another latin term. Here, "et" is simply "and". The word "cetera" stands for "others"/"remaining". So "et cetera" stands for "and others"/"and remaining".
If you are looking for trivia, in American English, etc., in the middle of a sentence should ALWAYS be followed by a comma, like it does in this sentence. In British English, etc. in the middle of a sentence should NEVER be followed by a comma, like in this one. In both forms, though, it should always be preceded by some punctuation mark.

"Daisy" is an abbreviation of day's eye which was indicative of the flower's property to show its central portion (its eye) during the day.

The exclamation "Gee whiz" is actually a corruption of "Jesus!" which presumably came about in order to demonstrate restraint.

"Chop chop" is a reduplication of chop or chop up which was a 16th century sea-term meaning "quickly". Interestingly, this also gave rise to the term "chop sticks" due to the fact that the Chinese were extremely agile in their usage of these sticks.

Difference between i.e. and e.g.

"Mayday" is commonly used as a cry for help. It comes from the french venez m'aider which literally translates into "come to my aid".

S.O.S is NOT, as is commonly presumed, an abbreviation of Save Our Souls or any other expansion. In fact, it doesn't stand for anything at all. The original distress signal was just the morse code ...---... and this is one symbol in morse code. It does not represent any letter or word as it is not separated by spaces. The translation SOS comes from interpolating the symbol with spaces after every 3 characters.

RSVP stands for "répondez s'il vous plaît" which means "please respond" in French.

XOXOX has a long debated history. Some claim that "X" looks like a mouth scrunched to make a kiss and that "O" looks like someone's arms wrapping around them. Other claims are that people used to sign letters/envelopes with a cross which looks like "X" and then kiss over it. The cross signified a union for religion (Christianity) and the kiss was like an oath over it.