Scribal abbreviation by "contraction" and was mostly a Christian usage for sacred words, Nomina Sacra; non-Christian sigla usage usually limited the number of letters the abbreviation comprised and omitted no intermediate letter. One practice was rendering an overused, formulaic phrase only as a siglum: DM for "Dis Manibus" ("Dedicated to the Manes"); IHS from the first three letters of "ΙΗΣΟΥΣ"; and RIP for "requiescat in pace" ("Rest in Peace") because the long-form written usage of the abbreviated phrase, by itself, was rare. According to Trabe, these abbreviations are not really meant to lighten the burden of the scribe but rather to shroud
Phrase anywhere outside of the sentence being analyzed, but it must function there as a complete grammatical unit. For example, in the sentence "Yesterday I saw an orange bird with a white neck", the words "an orange bird with a white neck" form what is called a noun phrase, or a determiner phrase in some theories, which functions as the object of the sentence. Theorists of syntax differ in exactly what they regard as a phrase; however, it is usually required to be a constituent of a sentence, in that it must include all the dependents of the units that it