i18n

English

WOTD – 31 July 2016

A Swiss-German computer keyboard

Alternative forms

I18N
I18n

Etymology

A numeronym representation of internationalization as i followed by 18 more letters, followed by n.

Pronunciation

(Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ɪntəˌnæʃ(ə)n(ə)ləˈzeɪʃən/
(General American) IPA^(key): /ɪntɚˌnæʃ(ə)n(ə)ləˈzeɪʃən/

Noun

i18n (uncountable)

(software engineering) Abbreviation of internationalization.
- 2002, David LeBlanc, Michael Howard, Writing Secure Code, Pearson Education (→ISBN), page 440:
  Don't convert between Unicode and other code pages/character sets. If you follow these two rules, you'll run into few I18N-related security issues; in fact, you can jump to the next chapter if these two rules hold true for your application!
- 2008, Philipp Weitershausen, Web Component Development with Zope 3, Springer Science & Business Media (→ISBN), page 145:
  After our tour through the translation components we can now make our Python code “i18n-aware”. A typical task is identifying all the places where a (Unicode) string needs to be turned into an i18n message or where the appropriate TAL […]
- 2015, Chandermani, AngularJS by Example, Packt Publishing Ltd (→ISBN), page 389:
  AngularJS comes with support for I18n and L10n for date, number, and currency. No surprises here!

Usage notes

The spelling i18n is preferred to I18N and I18n as the uppercase I (pronounced “eye”) is indistinguishable from a lowercase l (pronounced “el”) in many sans serif fonts.