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Concept
Contraction (grammar)
Summary
A contraction is a shortened version of the spoken and written forms of a word, syllable, or word group, created by omission of internal letters and sounds.
In linguistic analysis, contractions should not be confused with crasis, abbreviations and initialisms (including acronyms), with which they share some semantic and phonetic functions, though all three are connoted by the term "abbreviation" in layman’s terms. Contraction is also distinguished from morphological clipping, where beginnings and endings are omitted.
The definition overlaps with the term portmanteau (a linguistic blend), but a distinction can be made between a portmanteau and a contraction by noting that contractions are formed from words that would otherwise appear together in sequence, such as do and not, whereas a portmanteau word is formed by combining two or more existing words that all relate to a singular concept that the portmanteau describes.
English auxiliaries and contractions
English has a number of contractions, mostly involving the elision of a vowel (which is replaced by an apostrophe in writing), as in I'm for "I am", and sometimes other changes as well, as in won't for "will not" or ain't for "am not". These contractions are common in speech and in informal writing, but tend to be avoided in more formal writing (with limited exceptions, such as the mandatory form of "o'clock").
The main contractions are listed in the following table (for more explanation see English auxiliaries and contractions).
Contraction is a type of elision, simplifying pronunciation through reducing (dropping or shortening) sounds occurring to a word group.
In subject–auxiliary inversion, the contracted negative forms behave as if they were auxiliaries themselves, changing place with the subject. For example, the interrogative form of He won't go is Won't he go?, whereas the uncontracted equivalent is Will he not go?, with not following the subject.
The Old Chinese writing system (oracle bone script and bronzeware script) is well suited for the (almost) one-to-one correspondence between morpheme and glyph.
Official source
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