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Hi Eurus, and welcome to the forum!
I don't think that type of abbreviation (very popular in text messaging) would properly be called acrophony.
Using letters to represent words is, imho, somewhere between transliteration and phonemics. So maybe I'd coin the term transphonemics or even transphonics to describe this recent assault on the written word.
EDIT: I just Googled my suggested terms, and neither jibed with my intended meaning.
But then, we have several scholars in this forum who might suggest a more correct term derived from Latin or Greek.
I'd say heterograph could stand on its own, and kinda' like it. That type of abbreviation isn't really pictographic, as are hieroglyphics, Blissymbolics, or iConji.
Thinking more about your original question, I also came up with hyper-abbreviation, and also simply non-standard abbreviation. It's such a new phenomenon, used heavily in texting and to a lesser extend in email, that there may be no "official" word for it yet. Of course, that never stops a true logophile from trying to come up with one.
Indeed … nice catch telemath. I had totally forgotten about that term. Those abbreviations are indeed a type of rebus.
Curiously, why does the online dictionary say the plural is "rebuses" when most Latin words ending in "us" pluralize with an "i" ?
Anyway, from what I read when I reviewed the definition, I'm not sure it should even be called a "subset." Seems to fit the definition of rebus exactly. Reminded me of the old Concentration game show. No need to coin a new term when a perfectly good one already exists.
I agree with the rebus observation.
By the way, "rebus" in Latin is already a plural oblique form of "res" (thing). It can be translated as "by use of things". So a rebus is something spelled out by use of things instead of letters.
"Res" in a singular oblique form appears in the Latin "in re". This is often understood as being short for "in regard (to)" but historically it is unabreviated Latin for "in the matter (or thing)".
Ah! I knew the Latin word re means "thing", but I nevertheless assumed the English "re" was short for "regarding". Thanks, Glenn, that's a new one for me.
It's true that Latin words ending in '-us' often have their plurals in '-i', but more technically that's masculine nouns of the first declension. Some other '-us' words are actually from different declensions; lapsus, I learned a year or two ago, is one of those and its plural is lapsūs. And some words ending in '-us' aren't Latin but Latinicized Greek, with plurals in some other Greek declension; the plural of "octopus", as you may already know, is not "octopi" but "octopoda".
Then there's "agenda", which (like "rebus") is already a plural, in this case of "agendum". I suppose the only proper plural of "agenda", then, will have to be "agendas". And for the same reason, although I'd love to come up with some abstruse plural for "rebus" that I can use to feel secretly superior, I guess "rebuses" will have to do.
I was thinking about this some more the other day and was wondering what the intentional misspelling of words is called. A quick read gave me the terms satiric misspelling and sensational spelling. Although, it seems that we are moving away from using intentional misspellings to express affects and ideas, and more oft using the misspellings as conveniences. I am not trying to say this is a new trend, but only that it is more apparent due to technology.
The use of numbers and single letters for words in song titles seems to have experienced an upsurge at the hands of Prince (aka "the artist formerly known as 'the artist formerly known as Prince', known as 'Prince"), a few years before "textspeak" became all the rage. The form was used both in songs he recorded himself (I Would Die 4 U, U Got the Look) and those he gave to other artists (Sinead O'Connor's Nothing Compares 2 U).
That got me wondering what the earliest hit song was with a deliberately misspelled word in its title. I decided to disqualify simple folksy contraction words like wishin' or wanna. For a while the earliest I could think of was Sly and the Family Stone's Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin), and then I stumbled across a slightly earlier hit, the Guess Who's Undun.
Before that, you pretty much have to go back to the big band era for Mam'selle (a 1947 hit for, among others, Frank Sinatra), and a Red Ingle rural parody of Temptation released as Tim-Tay-Shun that same year.
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