I just brought a layer over from one map to another and noticed that my labels were no longer abbreviating. I went to re-enable the abbreviation dictionary in the labeling settings and found that despite showing up in the 'Dictionary' box, it was not listed in the dropdown for that box, nor was it listed in the 'Abbreviation Dictionaries' dialog. It seems that these are saved to the map, not the project. It would be useful to have them available project-wide so as to avoid a need to export & import for each individual map on the same project, and to maintain layers' appearance when moving them (at least within a project). It would also help with making modifications to the dictionary easier -- currently, if you want to make a change, you'd need to export and reimport to each map every time.
I suppose saving them at the application level may work as well, but that may be messier than it's worth. Project-level would probably be good enough; maybe when dragging a layer that has an abbreviation dictionary turned on, the dictionary would copy over to the destination project. That would help with inter-project layer dragging and maintaining the dictionary with ease.
