Аннотация:The coronavirus pandemic has made us aware of the far-reaching health implications of the new disease, hence the widespread interest in biomedical literature among both professionals and non-specialists. Medical discourse proper and educational articles in the media, targeted at non-specialists, demonstrate certain similarities in the way abbreviated terms are functioning in modern English today. To avoid ambiguities and misunderstanding key terms, when first introduced, are accompanied by their full equivalents in a close context. Double commas and double brackets are the punctuation marks used to introduce the terms. The brevity of nomination is essential as it allows further derivation and compounding from an abbreviated base. Unstable compounds appear both in professional and educational texts. Affixation – suffixation and prefixation included - is more often observable in specialized biomedical discourse.