What you're talking about is called a scribal abbreviation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribal_abbreviation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribal_abbreviatio

What you're talking about is called a scribal abbreviation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribal_abbreviation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribal_abbreviation It's actually more complex than simply adding a slash to indicate you're omitting letters. Both the position of the mark and the kind of mark you make indicate exactly what letters are being omitted. It's a medieval form of shorthand, except unlike modern shorthand, it appears in all kinds of books. Back when every copy of every book had to be written by hand, it was acceptable to take shortcuts. Oh, and the really cool part is that scribal abbreviations were the banner feature of Unicode 5.1 (you can thank MUFI for putting the work into getting these into Unicode), so you can actually use them in text now!