Okay. I see the problem now. You were using "contraction" in kind of a generic way, to mean "a shortening" or "an abbreviation", while I was thinking of the specific meaning it has when you're talking about grammar. (Likewise, the word "abbreviation" has its own specific, grammar-related meaning that's narrower than its generic meaning. But that's neither here nor there.)

Now, as it happens, "typo" is neither a contraction nor an abbreviation. It's just a plain old word, with its own entry in all four of the dictionaries I just checked. Two did not give a plural form; those that did both recommended "typos", as one would hope.


For anyone who really cares about all this, I'd suggest these steps:

1. Get a dictionary.
2. Get a conservative style guide.
3. Use them consistently.

If you do this, you won't have to rely on random rules that you have picked up from various sources, or the well-intentioned but possibly misinformed opinions of others. From what I can tell, the guys who write dictionaries and style guides are true language geeks who have pretty good reasons for what they recommend. They may disagree among themselves on some of the finer points, but if you pick one guide and one dictionary and stick with them, you'll be in pretty good shape.

[To the reader: Please note in the following paragraph how the author blatantly, but with extreme cleverness and great irony, employs his own pedantic snarkiness to argue against the same in others. Thank you. The Management]

One last point is that all this pedantic snarkiness about grammar and spelling and punctuation kind of pollutes this forum. It would be different if we were a bunch of copy editors. But we're not. We're 8051 geeks. It doesn't matter that our Highly Opinionated Expert sometimes types as though he's wearing oven mitts. It doesn't matter that our Learned PhD Physicist can't spell "sophisticated". It doesn't matter that the Human Hyperlink Generator has occasional trouble with homonyms! It doesn't matter that our Faithful Defender Of The Past sometimes gets so verbose that you have no clue what he is talking about.

All of these characters generally get their points across just fine, and it just seems silly to get all prissy about the odd misplaced apostrophe.

-- Russ