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Help[Facts] Re: What does Jno. stand for?
in reply to a message by MRF
According to http://www.serv.net/~camel/wodehouse/jno.html:
...It was once the habit of men who wrote out legal documents and such for a living, to make abbreviations wherever possible. They were, after all, paid by the document, not by the letter. And so the name John, being a common name in England at this time, was commonly abbreviated something thusly:
| n o
_| ---
That is, with a big J, followed by a little n and a little o over a line. There being no easy way of representing this in type, when printing came to be done on a press there needed to be some way of representing this. As it happened, the way settled on was as "Jno." ...
...It was once the habit of men who wrote out legal documents and such for a living, to make abbreviations wherever possible. They were, after all, paid by the document, not by the letter. And so the name John, being a common name in England at this time, was commonly abbreviated something thusly:
| n o
_| ---
That is, with a big J, followed by a little n and a little o over a line. There being no easy way of representing this in type, when printing came to be done on a press there needed to be some way of representing this. As it happened, the way settled on was as "Jno." ...
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