The Rice University Neologisms Database

A music major at Rice University. Many students at Rice use the abbreviations in the course catalog to refer to a student in that major. Using the course abbreviation to stand for a person’s major is a popular form of metonymy at Rice. The word musi, taken from the course abbreviation MUSI, is but one popular example of this phenomenon. The motivation for using a clipping such as this is to be concise, which is especially apparent when discussing majors with long names, such as bioengineering. This specific word is most likely used exclusively at Rice. However, students at many other universities use similar clippings to refer to their majors.