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The two answers that spring to mind are "abbreviable" and "abbreviatable," however neither of them feel correct. Searching the Internet has yielded no conclusive results - dictionaries seem to contain no entries for this, and people seem to restructure their sentence to avoid this problem. Trying to find usage of the two candidates I thought of is just as inconclusive, with no definitions or accepted standard.

Is there a correct answer? A single word is preferable.

An example in English would be "The phrase 'I don't know' is abbreviable to 'IDK'."

The original intended usage is for a Python project. Using more than one word for this would be too verbose.

class AbbreviatableIdentifier:
    ...
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  • The first question I've ever agreed has shown reasonable signs of research as being nil. Worth an upvote. 'Wiktionary' tends to be a bit quicker on the uptake when it comes to new words than some more ... er ... traditional dictionaries, so these words are probably not all that common.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Sep 19, 2019 at 15:23
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    Surely anything called AbbreviatableIdentifier could more sensibly be called Identifier (with a little effort almost any identifier can be abbreviated), and the abbreviation would be called AbbreviatedIdentifier. In some cases the two attributes of the same thing might be the same but so what ? The rarity of occurrence of the words abbreviable and abbreviatable perhaps hints that the concept is not used very much, and that it isn't useful very often.
    – High Performance Mark
    Commented Oct 19, 2019 at 18:03
  • How about "abr'v'able"?
    – Hot Licks
    Commented Feb 16, 2020 at 15:14

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The word "abbreviable" is synonymous with "abbreviateable", so your example is correct.

From Wikitionary:

abbreviable (adjective): Able to be abbreviated.

That said, you don't have to use full words while programming. A function name like "AbbrID" would have enough context clues to key in a reader to what the function does without being too verbose to type each time you need it.

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  • Abbreviating it to "abbr" is exactly the workaround I was using. In the context of its actual usage it's a little more ambiguous (is it referring to something that is an abbreviation, or something that could be abbreviated?), but it's a good enough solution.
    – Robert
    Commented Sep 20, 2019 at 0:12

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