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 can be made empirically by applying constituency tests. The common use of the term "phrase" is different from that employed by some phrase structure theories of syntax. The everyday understanding of the phrase is that it consists of two or more words, whereas depending on the theory of syntax that one employs, individual words may or may not qualify as phrases. The trees in the previous section, for instance, do not view individual words as phrases. Theories of syntax that employ X-bar theory, in contrast, will acknowledge many individual words as phrases. This practice is because sentence structure is analysed