A project on Georgian Epigraphy <ref xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" target="ftn1" n="1" /> in the context of which this article is grounded brought our attention to two phenomena which seem inseparably intertwined with the epigraphic record: abbreviations and gaps. In Old Georgian, abbreviations are very prominent and yet very heterogeneous. That is more so than in other (historical) languages. One finds many abbreviations for the same word, compare Boeder (1987). In this article, we assess the research question why this is so by trying to highlight properties of Old Georgian abbreviations, which can also be used as an aid to read them. We use Old Georgian abbreviations in inscriptions and manuscripts from the Titus web-site, Gippert (1995) under more entered within the Georgian National Corpus <ref xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" target="ftn2" n="2" />. In order to take a somewhat wider perspective and enable data hungry technologies to aid in the analyses of the aforementioned phenomena <ref xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" target="ftn3" n="3" />, we decided to compare the Georgian record with one of the largest digital epigraphic records available, classical Latin, for which we use data from the Epigraphic database Heidelberg <ref xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" target="ftn4" n="4" />: last accessed December 2016. The Latin data is several orders of magnitude larger than the Georgian one. While Latin contains roughly 70,000 inscriptions, Georgian features 91, so we decided to additionally analyse abbreviations in Old Georgian manuscripts. We ended up with roughly 4,000 abbreviations for Old Georgian (roughly 1,100 from the inscriptions) and roughly 170,000 for Latin.