I think you're reading too much into it. "i18n" exists because, frankly, it's too long; it's a 20-letter word, one of the longest in common usage, and it's bori

I think you're reading too much into it. "i18n" exists because, frankly, it's too long; it's a 20-letter word, one of the longest in common usage, and it's boring and time-consuming to type, and easy to mistype. There is a long tradition in hacker culture to shorten and optimize things whenever possible, going back to the early days of Unix and C ("sh" for shell, "rm" for remove and so on). The reason i18n has a number is that it's awkward to abbreviate without; the C/Unix-style tradition of removing vowels to abbreviate would render it unreadable ("intrntnlztn"? "intrlzn"?). Case in point: One of the companies I co-founded, Transparensee, has a very long name. Internally we started referring to it as t11e everywhere, including the domain names we use for dev stuff (t11e.com works as an alias for transparensee.com). Edit: We also have l10n (localization) and m17n (multilingualization), incidentally.