If you're interested in typing fewer characters, you could create an environment variable for a directory.
For example, on most distros, the variable $HOME is used to represent /home/username/.
If you have a directory you frequently work with, such as /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/ for example, you could do
export fontdir=/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts
Then when you want to use this directory, do
command $fontdir
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