Portuguese Language Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists, teachers and learners wanting to discuss the finer points of the Portuguese language. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I'm trying to find a shorter version of the word "estatísticas" to use on an interface where I am restricted on space.
In English, you can abbreviate "Statistics" as "Stats". Is there an abbreviation that is commonly used in Portuguese? If not, what would be a shortened version that would be understandable and not look strange if absolutely needed?
For journals title abbreviations, Estat. or estat. is used, for instance, by the Revista Brasileira de Estatística, which is abbreviated to R. Bras. Estat. This is also the rule for abbreviation of titles to periodicals and other serials set by the Brazilian Association of Technical Standards (ABNT), NBR 6032.
As Valdeir Psr points out in his comment, the Academia Brasileira de Letras provides a list of common abbreviations, which includes:
estat. estatística
estatíst. estatística
Of these, the first indeed seems more common (and useful) to me.
In physics, Mecânica Estatística is sometimes colloquially referred to as "mecstat", especially by students. Though I haven't seen any other context where "stat" is an accepted abbreviation of "estatística", using the English "Stats" in an interface might be an acceptable, if inelegant solution.
As the friend has already commented we can use these two forms in a formal way: estat. — estatística estatíst. — estatística
But we can shorten in a more informal way in which everyone will understand what we are talking about, and the use of the English abbreviation in this case is also welcome, since they are related words, so using "stats" in this case would be no problem .
estat.orestatíst.