German abbreviates differently from English, and the difference is systematic rather than random.

English shortens by clipping the end of a word or taking initials. German keeps the consonant skeleton and throws away the vowels. Vielleicht becomes vllt. Irgendwie becomes iwie. The reader puts the vowels back automatically, which works because German spelling is regular enough to support it.

Once you see that rule, most of the list below decodes itself.

The everyday set

vllt / vlt: vielleicht, maybe.

iwie: irgendwie, somehow. Its siblings iwas (irgendwas) and iwann (irgendwann) work the same way.

kA: keine Ahnung, no idea. Usually written with the capital A.

hdl: hab dich lieb, an affectionate sign-off between friends, family and partners. Weaker than ich liebe dich and used far more freely. The extended hdgdl is hab dich ganz doll lieb.

sry: sorry, borrowed and unchanged.

gn8: gute Nacht, using the number eight for acht. The one piece of genuinely playful German abbreviation, and slightly dated for it.

bb: bis bald, see you soon. Also bd for bis dann.

kb: kein Bock, not up for it, from the Rotwelsch verb covered in the German register article.

wmds: was machst du so, what are you up to. A conversation opener in four letters.

WE: Wochenende, the weekend. Capitalised, because it is a noun.

The workplace layer, which actually matters

This is the part nobody explains and everybody is judged on. German internal email closes with a three-letter sign-off, and the choice is a warmth setting.

LG: liebe Grüße, literally dear greetings. Friendly, normal between colleagues who know each other, and the default in most German offices.

VG: viele Grüße, many greetings. Neutral. Safe with anyone.

MfG: mit freundlichen Grüßen, with friendly greetings. Formal, correct, and in an internal message from someone who normally writes LG, unmistakably cool. Germans read a switch from LG to MfG as a temperature drop, and they are usually right.

BG: beste Grüße, best regards. Sits between VG and MfG.

The rule of thumb: match what the other person sent you. If they open with LG, replying with MfG is a statement.

The two words that run German working life

Bescheid: as in sag Bescheid or gib mir Bescheid, let me know. Appears in an enormous share of internal messages.

Sprachnachricht: a voice message, casually Sprachi. Germany uses these far less than Brazil does, and sending long ones to colleagues is still mildly frowned upon, which is itself useful cultural information.

The generational split

hdl and gn8 belong to the generation that texted before smartphones, when every character was counted. They survive, but they place you.

Younger German writing leans on borrowed English (sry, nice, safe, cringe) and on the vowel-dropping rule, which is productive rather than fixed: a German speaker can invent wsdw for was soll das werden on the spot and be understood. That is the part a word list cannot capture, and the part worth understanding.

Why this counts as vocabulary

Because you will meet German in this form constantly, and none of it is decodable from the German you were taught. Vllt is not a word you can look up. It is a compression scheme you either know or do not.

The workplace sign-offs matter more still, because they are the one place where a learner can be fluent and still send the wrong signal without realising it.

How to learn them

Save the message with the sender. LG = liebe Grüße is a fact. LG, used by everyone on the team except the department head, who writes VG is the actual information.

Paste the full message into Translate. Vowel-dropped German defeats dictionary lookup completely, and needs the surrounding sentence to reconstruct.

Then let repetition do it. There are about twenty of these in daily circulation. Two weeks of capture and the list is finished, permanently.

The short version

Learn the vowel rule and most abbreviations decode themselves. Learn kA, vllt, Bescheid and bb for messages.

And learn the LG / VG / MfG ladder before you send your first internal email, because it is the one item here that people actually read something into.

Got a German message that looked like missing letters? Paste the whole line into Vokabulo. Free to start on iPhone and iPad. ✉️