You all might know I live and breathe for having as many "in the" and "of the" phrases as possible. The fingers trip along in delight! Well, "within the" is just as important. "withe" is what I use for "within the." Well, I need to build my phrases up. So far, sometimes I've added a letter at the end, so that "within the colon" is wtcx. But I'm not thrilled with that. I have to have another letter in there to differentiate from "with" and other words. I was thinking about using wn, as in:

wntgb = within the gallbladder
wntc = within the colon
wntllq = within the left lower quadrant

etc.

Maybe wt would work better than wn. I'm on the wrong computer now to best check it out with what I already have.

What do you use for these phrases?

well, I'll start off with saying that this site has given me much more than I can ever give back, but I can sure try......

Now for my....

I use "wi" for within so anything else would be unnatural to me. I would leave out a lot of the "little" words in the abbreviations such as "a," "the," etc., and just use the "big" words unless you needed to differentiate between the abbreviations, less to have to remember.....

wigb = within the gallbladder

willq = within the left lower quadrant

wirlq = within the right lower quadrant

wiluq = within the left upper quadrant

wiruq = within the right upper quadrant

One of the things I like about IT is that you can put in the whole abbreviation, including the first letter of "little words," and then skip them as you type, abbreviating the abbreviation, if you wish. That way you get the same results even if you add a letter for a little word as you type.

You know, I know IT can do that, and what a marvelous feature it is! I've yet to put my finger on what it is exactly, but two things: for certain phrases I just want a system, no matter what, (I think in this case it's because, even though you can do that with IT, if you have tons and tons of entries that start with w, I don't know, you'll still end up "looking" down at the advisories. It's hard to talk about IT sometimes, LOL! Because you might think I don't use the "abbreviate the abbreviation," feature, but indeed I do! It's awesome. Particularly for very long phrases. But I find I use that for some expansions and practically never for others!

Then also, as Babs says, it's awfully nice to not have every single little letter in there regardless of your expander. I believe CarolT does this, as well. (Correct me if I'm wrong, Carol)! And I used to have many short forms such as that, but, if I did not use them over and over, really frequently, I would forget they were there. And even with IT, if I put wigb, you watch, my fingers will go for wt first and bam, I'll have passed it up!

On the other hand! It is rare for any doctor to say "within gallbladder" or "within colon." Most of them do add the "the" in there. And I do love to shorten abbreviations as much as possible. I'll think about it some more!

Hope I haven't driven anyone insane trying to understand me!