War Net

As my car pass through a small street in Jakarta, I saw a sign with the words "WAR NET" pointing in a certain direction.

My first thought was - Is this side pointing to a Jihadist hideout? Or to a gathering place for ISIS training?

I remembered seeing a similar sign a few years ago. It stands for WARung interNET. This means "Internet Shop".

In the English language it is common to use the first initial of the word as abbreviation, e.g. IS for Internet Shop.

In the Indonesian language, they prefer to use one syllable of the word as an abbreviation, e.g. WAR for Warung (Shop) and NET for interNet.

Many Indonesian words are quite long with three or four syllables. So, it is quite common to shorten these words using one syllable that most people can associate with the word.