Origin of the Abbreviation 'i18n'

It's amazing how often I still see "I didn't know that!" to this fact on Twitter :-)

There was a brief fad of writing entire sentences using this style of shortening words earlier this year, so I wrote a quick script to "decode" them if anyone is so inclined! https://gist.github.com/peterc/bf495244dd098cdd7ddca241dab33... .. by this I can also see i18n could also cover interdifferentiation or intercrystallization..