The ABBR element provides an encapsulation and enumeration mechanism for abbreviations that appear in the body text. For example, consider a web page that includes your company's address. At one point in the document, the abbreviation IA is used for Iowa. A spelling checker, language translation program, or speech synthesizer might choke on this abbreviation; a search engine would not include the word "Iowa" in its relevancy rating calculation. But by turning the IA text into an ABBR element (and assigning a TITLE attribute to it), you can provide a full-text equivalent that a search engine (if so equipped) can count; a text-to-speech program would read aloud the full state name instead of some guttural gibberish. Like many elements new in HTML 4.0, this one is intended to assist browser technologies that may not yet be implemented but could find their way into products of the future.

A related element, ACRONYM, offers the same services for words that are acronyms. Both elements are part of a larger group of what the HTML 4.0 recommendation calls phrase elements.

An advisory description of the element. For the ABBR element, it plays a vital role in providing a hidden full-text description of the abbreviation rendered in the document.