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What is the meaning of wrt in the following text?

I think this is an excellent idea, but I'd like to see this explicitly reframed under the banner of providing Drupal.org data through publicly-accessible APIs. We started kicking off at least one discussion like that wrt Git over at http://groups.drupal.org/node/126529, which also led back to "#112805: XML-RPC Interface".

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41

It's an abbreviation for "with respect to".

Edit: regarding the lack of punctuation (thanks for bringing it up, ukayer), that's definitely because of the informal nature of the context. It would be more standard to write it as w.r.t., except that in any context where punctuation matters, you probably shouldn't use this abbreviation in the first place.

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  • There seem to be a class of abbreviations such as wrt that don't require any punctuation or capitalization, any idea why? – ukayer Feb 23 '11 at 3:29
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    It's not that they don't require capitalisation or punctuation, but that they're generally used in terser forms of communication like e-mails, short memoranda and SMS messages, where haste rules the day. There are some older abbreviations (such as c for with) that are derived from handwritten abbreviations that were either underlined and raised above the baseline of the text or overlined -- the abbreviations survived the transition to the typewriter for business use, but the lining and position didn't. – bye Feb 23 '11 at 6:48
  • Using w.r.t. is definitely acceptable in even the most formal technical contexts, e.g. in published mathematical research. In fact, I remember some discussion of the fact that David Foster Wallace over-enthusiastically embraced this and other technical jargon in a non-fiction book he wrote about the notion of infinity. – Daniel McLaury Nov 6 '14 at 9:24
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    @Martha, Isn't it with "regards" to? – Pacerier May 4 '15 at 23:19
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    @ShayanAmani, no, that would be like saying "enter your PIN number at the ATM machine" (enter your personal identification number number at the automated teller machine machine): "...compute cost function with respect to to the parameters of the system..." – JPmiaou Sep 17 '19 at 13:46
20

WRT is an abbreviation that stands for with respect to or with regard to

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