Memorability

Lesshand should be easy to learn, so its abbreviations should be easy to remember. It should also be easy to read, so its abbreviations should echo the word or phrase they abbreviate. To evaluate these aspects of Lesshand, we assign every abbreviation a score called memorability. Good abbreviations have high memorability.

R007: Memorable requires that all abbreviations in Lesshand have a memorability of more than 5, except those for the 128 most common words.

Memorability is additive. For an abbreviation long --> short, it works as follows:

• Add 3 if short starts with the same letter as long
• Add 3 if short ends with the same letter as long
• Add the length of short if it is a prefix of long
• Add the length of short if it is equal to long without all of the vowels
• Add 1 for each character that short shares with long (if they appear in the same order)
• Add 10 for being a contraction of another abbreviation (e.g., cn' gets +10 because of cn)
• Remove 1 if long contains an apostrophe and short does not.

For example:

• and --> d: has a memorabilty of 5
• can --> cn: has a memorability of 10
• government --> govt: has a memorability 10
• if I remember correctly --> ,iirc has a memorability of 7