I have to ask - where did the "g" come from in "manufacturer"?
> mfg came from manufacturing; its existence meant that some people started using it for manufacturer as well; but having a g in the abbreviation without one in the word bothered people, so they added an r to make it mfgr.
This leads me to wish there was a well-researched blog for abbreviation/initialism/acronym etymologies, the way https://grammarphobia.com/ is for English word etmologies. But I guess there aren't that many of these that are in need of explanation; usually they're pretty obvious.
Something that always amuses me is that the two-letter abbreviation for Shanghai is SH. I find this funny because it seems so natural from an English perspective.
In fact, of course, nobody cares what English speakers think about a Chinese abbreviation of a Chinese name, and the H in the abbreviation refers to the second H in the word, not the first.