Notes on the table of abbreviations

The following table describes common abbreviations used in Finnish. The following notations are mostly excluded here (but can partly be found in Lyhenneluettelo by the Institute for the Languages of Finland):

• international identifiers, such as identifiers of units and chemical elements, e.g. V for the volt, C for carbon; they are, or should be, the same across languages, though their pronunciation may vary
• initialisms that denote organizations, products, etc., such as SAK
• initialisms for academic degrees such as OTL = oikeustieteen lisensiaatti, intended for limited use in catalogs and similar contexts, though often used even in prose text

In the Notes column, the note “Usually read by letters” means that the abbreviation is commonly read by saying the letter names, e.g. alv as aa äl vee, though this is not always accepted in very formal presentations. The note “Sometimes read by letters” suggests that such pronunciation is even more colloquial.