Acronym
Acronyms and initialisms are abbreviations such as NATO, laser or DNA, written as the initial letter or letters of words, and pronounced based on this abbreviated written form.
Of the two words, acronym is the much more frequently used and known, and many dictionaries, speakers and writers refer to all abbreviations formed from initial letters as acronyms. However, some still differentiate between acronyms and initialisms: an acronym was originally a pronounceable word formed from the initial letter or letters of the constituent words, such as NATO /neɪtoʊ/ or RADAR /reɪdɑɹ/, from RAdio Detection And Ranging, while an initialism referred to an abbreviation pronounced as the names of the individual letters, such as TLA /ti.ɛl.eɪ/ or XHTML.
History
Acronyms and initialisms are a relatively new linguistic phenomenon, having only become popular during the 20th century. As literacy rates rose, the practice of referring to words by their first letters became increasingly convenient. The first recorded use of the word initialism in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is in 1899, and the first for acronym is in 1943. The word acronym comes from Greek: ακρος, akros, "topmost, extreme" + ονομα, onoma, "name".
Nonetheless, earlier examples of acronyms exist. The early Christians in Rome used a fish as a symbol for Jesus in part because of an acronym—fish in Greek is ΙΧΘΥΣ (ichthus), which was said to stand for Ιησους Χριστος Θεου Υιος Σωτηρ (Iesous CHristos THeou (h)Uios Soter: Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour). Evidence of this interpretation dates from the second and third centuries and is preserved in the catacombs of Rome.
Initialisms are known to have been used in Rome dating back even earlier than the Christian era. For example, the official name for the Roman Empire (and the Republic before it) was abbreviated as SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus), showing a clear precedent.
Acronyms have been widely used in Hebrew since at least the Middle Ages. Several important rabbis are referred to with acronyms of their names. For example, Baal Shem Tov is called Besht. The word Tanakh is also an acronym.
Acronyms and initialisms often occur in jargon or as names of organizations because they often serve as abbreviations of long terms that are frequently referenced, so a shortened form is desirable. Militaries and government agencies frequently employ acronyms and initialisms, perhaps most famously the US Government and the so-called alphabet agencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. The correct meaning of an acronym is frequently domain-specific knowledge, and many acronyms have different meanings in different domains. This has led some to use them to obfuscate meaning from those without such domain-specific knowledge.
Written usage
Abbreviations have been traditionally written using a full stop/period to mark the part that was deleted. In the case of most acronyms and initialisms, each letter is its own abbreviation, and in theory should get its own full stop/period. This usage is becoming less common as the presence of all capital letters is sufficient to indicate the word is an abbreviation; nevertheless some influential American style guides still insist on the many-periods treatment, such as the one used by The New York Times (which recommends periods after unpronounceable abbreviations such as "K.G.B." but not for pronounceable ones (acronyms), such as "NATO" [1]), but other style guides, such as that of the BBC, no longer require this. Larry Trask, American author of the Penguin Guide to Punctuation, states categorically that, in British English, "this tiresome and unnecessary practice is now obsolete"[2].
Some acronyms undergo assimilation into ordinary words, when technical terms become commonplace with non-technical people: often they are then written in lower case, and eventually it is widely forgotten that the word was derived from the initials of others: scuba (Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus) and laser (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation), for instance. The term anacronym has been coined as a portmanteau of the words anachronism and acronym to describe acronyms whose original meaning is not known to most speakers.
While typically abbreviations exclude the initials of short function words (such as "and", "or", "of", or "to"), they are sometimes included in acronyms to make them pronounceable. Numbers (both cardinal and ordinal) in names are often represented by digits rather than initial letters; e.g. 4GL (Fourth generation language) or G77 (Group of 77). One exception is TLA for "three-letter acronym/abbreviation": 3LA would not itself be a TLA, spoiling the self-referential humor.
The traditional style of pluralizing single letters with "'s" ("there are two Q's in that word") was naturally extended to acronyms when they were commonly written with periods, and is still preferred by some people for initialisms. It is, however, very common to inflect them like ordinary words; thus the usual plural of "CD" is "CDs," with "CD's" being reserved for the possessive. When an acronym is part of a computer function that is conventionally written in lowercase letters, it is common to use an apostrophe to pluralize or otherwise conjugate the token (in computer lingo, it is not uncommon to use the name of a computer program, format, or function, acronym or no, as a verb, e.g., "John zipped the files" or "John zip'ed the files" means that John used the program zip on the files to conglomerate them), resulting in sentences like "be sure to remove any extraneous dll's after the program finishes uninstalling."
In some languages, the convention of doubling the letters in the initialism is used to indicate plural words, for example the Spanish acronym EE.UU. for Estados Unidos ("United States"). This convention is followed for a limited number of English abbreviations, such as pp. for "pages".
In some cases, an acronym or initialism has been turned into a name. The letters making up the name of the SAT college entrance test, for example, no longer officially stand for anything. This trend has been common with many companies hoping to retain their brand recognition while simultaneously moving away from what they saw as an outdated image: American Telephone and Telegraph is now simply AT&T, the company formerly named Kentucky Fried Chicken changed its name to "KFC" (though whether to avoid negative connotations of the word "fried", or regional associations with Kentucky, or to allow products other than chicken remains a subject of speculation); British Petroleum changed its name to "BP" to emphasize that it was no longer only an oil company (captured by the motto "beyond petroleum"); and Silicon Graphics, Incorporated changed its name to "SGI" to emphasize that it was no longer only a computer graphics company. Initialisms may have advantages in international markets; for example, some national affiliates of International Business Machines are legally incorporated as "IBM" (or, for example, "IBM Canada") to avoid translating the full name into local languages. This rebranding can lead to RAS syndrome, as when Trustee Savings Bank became "TSB Bank".
Sometimes, the initials are kept but the meaning is changed. SADD, for instance, originally Students Against Driving Drunk, changed the full form of its name to Students Against Destructive Decisions. YM originally stood for Young Miss, and later Young & Modern, but now stands for simply Your Magazine. DVD, curiously enough, has become bereft of official meaning, as some of its advocates decided the original "Digital Video Disc" moniker was too limiting, and wanted to change it to "Digital Versatile Disc", yet were unable to bring all members on board. The initialism now has "no official meaning".
When initialisms are defined in print, especially in the case of industry-specific jargon, the words forming the abbreviation are often capitalized for clarity. While this would be perfectly acceptable for proper nouns like Kentucky Fried Chicken, some usage writers have argued that it is technically incorrect for other terms like storage area network. Correct or not, such usage is widespread in English publications.
Nomenclature
Initialism originally referred to abbreviations formed from initials, without reference to pronunciation, but during the middle portion of the twentieth century, when acronyms and initialisms saw more use than ever before, the word acronym was coined for abbreviations which are pronounced as a word, like "NATO" or "AIDS". The term initialism is now typically taken to refer to abbreviations which are pronounced by sounding out the name of each constituent letter (e.g. HTML). Some have erroneously extended the term acronym in meaning to describe all abbreviations made from initial letters, regardless of pronunciation.
There is no agreement as to what to call abbreviations that contain single letters, but can otherwise be pronounced as a word, such as JPEG (Jay-Peg). These abbreviations are sometimes referred to as acronym-initialism hybrids, although they are grouped by some under the broad meaning of acronym.
Examples
- pronounced as a word, containing only initial letters:
- pronounced as a word, containing non-initial letters:
- pronounced as a word or names of letters, depending on speaker or context:
- FAQ: (fack or ef-ay-kyu) Frequently asked questions
- SQL: (sequel or es-kyu-el) Structured Query Language
- VAT: (vat or vee-ay-tee): Value added tax
- IRA: (ira or eye-are-ay): When used for Irish Republican Army, always pronounced as letters; when used for Individual Retirement Account, can be pronounced as letters or (more rarely) as a word.
- pronounced as a combination of names of letters and a word:
- JPEG: (JAY-peg) Joint Photographic Experts Group
- IUPAC: (AYE-YOU-pac) International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry
- CD-ROM: (SEE-DEE-rom) compact disk - read-only memory
- PDFORRA: (PEE-DEE-forra) Permanent Defence Forces Other Ranks Representative Association
- pronounced only as the names of letters
- pronounced as the names of letters that also sound like words
- pronounced as the names of letters but with a shortcut
- shortcut incorporated into name
- recursive acronyms, where the acronym itself is the expansion of one initial
- VISA: VISA International Service Association
- GNU: GNU's Not Unix
- WINE: Wine Is Not an Emulator
- PHP: PHP Hypertext Pre-Proccessor
- GOD GOD Over Djinn, from Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach
Trivia
The longest acronym, according to the 1965 edition of Acronyms, Initialisms and Abbreviations Dictionary, is ADCOMSUBORDCOMPHIBSPAC, a United States Navy term that stands for "Administrative Command, Amphibious Forces, Pacific Fleet Subordinate Command."
The world's longest initialism, according to the Guinness Book of World Records is NIIOMTPLABOPARMBETZHELBETRABSBOMONIMONKONOTDTEKHSTROMONT. The 56-letter initialism (54 in Cyrillic) is from the Concise Dictionary of Soviet Terminology and means "The laboratory for shuttering, reinforcement, concrete and ferroconcrete operations for composite-monolithic and monolithic constructions of the Department of the Technology of Building-assembly operations of the Scientific Research Institute of the Organization for building mechanization and technical aid of the Academy of Building and Architecture of the USSR."
Sometimes an acronym's official meaning is crafted to fit an acronym that actually means something that sounds less "official." For instance, the Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) weapon recently developed in the United States is popularly called the "mother of all bombs" since it is the largest conventional bomb in the world; it is widely assumed that the "mother of all wars" phrase was the true inspiration for the MOAB acronym.
During the 1960s trend for action-adventure spy thrillers, it was a common practice for fictional spy organizations or their nemeses to employ names that were acronyms (or more accurately, backronyms). Sometimes these acronyms made sense but most of the time, they were words incongruously crammed together for the mere purpose of obtaining a catchy acronym, traditionally a heroic sounding one for the good guys and an appropriately menacing one for the bad guys. This has become one of the most commonly parodied clichés of the spy thriller genre. Some of the most popular were:
- C.O.N.T.R.O.L. and K.A.O.S. from the Get Smart series.
- F.I.R.M. from the 1980s TV series Airwolf
- M.A.S.K.: The Mobile Armored Strike Kommand, the mask-wearing cohort from 1980s saturday morning cartoon M.A.S.K.
- V.E.N.O.M. : The Vicious, Evil Network Of Mayhem, the evil mask-wearing cohort from 1980s saturday morning cartoon M.A.S.K.
- H.A.R.M. from the No One Lives Forever (NOLF) series of computer games, which were released in the 1990s, but were based in 1960s pop culture. What H.A.R.M actually stands for is never revealed, and speculation about its true meaning is the subject of several jokes in both games. (However, in the 1966 spy film Agent for H.A.R.M., it stands for Human Aetiological Relations Machine.)
- S.H.I.E.L.D. from the Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. Marvel comics.
- S.P.E.C.T.R.E. from the James Bond series.
- U.N.C.L.E. and T.H.R.U.S.H from The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (the meaning of T.H.R.U.S.H. was never revealed on the series)(In the novelizations, T.H.R.U.S.H. was stated to be "Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity.)
- P.A.G.A.N. (People Against Goodness and Normalcy) from the film Dragnet.
See also
- -onym
- Internet slang
- List of abbreviations
- List of acronyms and initialisms
- List of songs titled as acronyms or initialisms
- RAS syndrome (Redundant Acronym Syndrome syndrome)
- TLA (three-letter acronym/abbreviation)
- apronym
- backronym
- pseudo-acronym
- recursive acronym
External links
- initialisms.com— Acronyms, Abbreviations & Initialisms Directory
- Online Acronym Dictionary & Translator— Lookup or translate slang and acronyms
- Acronym Finder— searchable database of acronyms and abbreviations (over 400,000 entries)
- Acronym Search—searchable acronyms and abbreviation database (over 50,000 entries)
- Biomedical Acronym Database
- Acronyms Used by Asian Studies' Scholars: a Dictionary