Some time ago authentication was shortened to authn and authorization was shortened to authz. If I had to guess that was to aid people who had to write those wo

Some time ago authentication was shortened to authn and authorization was shortened to authz. If I had to guess that was to aid people who had to write those words a lot. In that aid, I think they've somewhat lost meaning and just became generalized as "auth". People generally do know there are two steps to auth, are aware of the standards, but when asked to put it in words struggle because of some lexical convergence. An analog to this is when I first stumbled upon words like a11y and i18n I had no idea what they meant. Now that I've actually had to deal with internationalization systems and accessibility systems I know very much what they mean, but similar to "auth" they're an umbrella invoking a large number of systems that can all function differently.