NS

NS as an abbreviation can mean:

Arts and entertainment

Gaming

• Natural Selection (video game), a mod for the game Half-life
• NetStorm: Islands At War, a real-time strategy game published in 1997 by Activision
• Nintendo Switch, a video game console
• Jennifer Government: NationStates, a web-based simulation game

Literature

• New Spring (known to fans as "NS"), a 1999 anthology edited by Robert Silverberg and derivative 2004 novella by Robert Jordan
• NS-series robots from the book I, Robot

Companies

• National Semiconductor (also known as "Natsemi"), an American integrated circuit design and manufacturing company
• Nederlandse Spoorwegen, the main public transport railway company in the Netherlands
• Norfolk Southern Railway, a major Class I railroad in the United States, owned by the Norfolk Southern Corporation
• Norfolk Southern Railway (1942–82), the final name of a railroad running in Virginia and North Carolina before its acquisition by the Southern Railway in 1974

Government and politics

• Nasjonal Samling, a 1930s Norwegian national socialist political party
• National service, a name for the conscription system of some militaries
• Nazism, also known as "National Socialism" in Germany, the ideology held by, amongst many other political parties, the National Socialist German Workers Party
• New Serbia (Нова Србија or Nova Srbija), a moderate nationalist political party in Serbia
• New Slovenia (also known as Nova Slovenija - Krscanski Ljudska Stranka), a right-of-centre political party in Slovenia
• People's Party (Narodna Stranka), a political party in the Republic of Montenegro
• No smoking. See smoking ban.

Places

• Negeri Sembilan, one of the fourteen states in Malaysia
• Novi Sad, a city in Serbia (license plate code)
• Nova Scotia, as the official Canadian postal abbreviation for the province

Science and technology

Biology and medicine

• Nervous system, the system of neurons that coordinates the actions of an organism
• Normal saline, a solution of sodium chloride used in intravenous drips

Computing

• Name server, a computer server that implements a name service protocol
  • NS record, a DNS record type
• Namespace, an abstract container used in computing
• NeXTSTEP, an object-oriented, multitasking operating system by NeXT, as well as a prefix for certain system-provided classes in the operating system, such as "NSString"
• ns (simulator) (or "ns-2"), an open source network simulator

Mathematics

• ns (elliptic function), one of Jacobi's elliptic functions

Other uses in science and technology

• Nanosecond (abbreviated "ns"), a measure of time
• Nanostructure
• Neutron star, a star formed from the collapsed remnant of a massive star
• NS3, a reusable launch vehicle from Blue Origin, being tested in 2017-18
• No significant difference, when differences between categories are smaller than the amount of error/noise in the data
• A ship prefix for civilian ship names, meaning "Nuclear Ship"

Other uses

• New Style (as "N.S." in opposition to Old Style as "O.S."), indicating either a date in the Julian Calendar with the start of year adjusted to 1 January, or a date in the Gregorian calendar