 Contraction, however, offered the practical advantage of indicating the case of the abbreviated noun.It is evident that the use of "nomina sacra" was an act of reverence rather than a purely practical space-saving device, as they were employed even where well-established abbreviations of far more frequent words such as "and" were avoided, and the "nomen sacrum" itself was written with generous spacing.Furthermore, early scribes often distinguished between mundane and sacred occurrences of the same word, e.g.