by "the", rather than as "Rev." or "Hon." respectively. This is true for most British publications, and some in the United States. A repeatedly used abbreviation should be spelt out for identification on its first occurrence in a written or spoken passage. Abbreviations likely to be unfamiliar to many readers should be avoided. Measurements: abbreviations or symbols Writers often use shorthand to denote units of measure. Such shorthand can be an abbreviation, such as "in" for "inch" or can be a symbol such as "km" for "kilometre" (or kilometer). In the International System of Units (SI) manual the word "symbol" is used consistently to define the shorthand used to represent the various SI units of measure. The manual also defines the way in which units should be written, the principal rules being: The conventions for upper and lower case letters must be observed—for example 1 MW (megawatts) is equal to 1,000,000 watts and 1,000,000,000 mW (milliwatts). No periods should be inserted between letters—for example "m.s" (which is an approximation of "m·s", which correctly uses middle dot) is the symbol for "metres multiplied by seconds", but "ms" is the symbol for milliseconds. No periods should follow the symbol unless the syntax of the sentence demands otherwise (for example a full stop at the end of a sentence). The singular and plural versions of the symbol are identical—not all languages use the letter "s" to denote a plural. Syllabic abbreviation A syllabic abbreviation is usually formed from the initial syllables of several words, such as Interpol = International + police. It is a variant of the acronym. Syllabic abbreviations are usually written using lower case, sometimes starting with a capital letter, and are always pronounced as words rather than letter by letter. Syllabic abbreviations should be distinguished from portmanteaus, which combine two words without necessarily taking whole syllables from each. By language Albanian In Albanian, syllabic acronyms are sometimes used for composing a person's name, such as Migjeni – an abbreviation from his original name (Millosh Gjergj Nikolla) a famous Albanian poet and writer – or ASDRENI (Aleksander Stavre Drenova), another famous Albanian poet. Other such names which are used commonly in recent decades are GETOAR, composed from Gegeria + Tosks (representing the two main dialects of the Albanian language, Gegë and Toskë, based on the country's two main regions Gegëria and Toskëria, and Arbanon - which is an alternative way used