Acronym

Etymology

From acro- "sharp, high" + -onym "name", modelled after homonym and synonym. From Ancient Greek ἄκρος (akros) "extremity" and ὄνομα "name".

Noun - acronym (plural acronyms)

• 1. An abbreviation formed by (usually initial) letters taken from a word or series of words, and which is itself pronounced as a word, such as RAM, radar, or scuba; sometimes contrasted with initialism.
• 2. Any abbreviation so formed, regardless of pronunciation, such as TNT, IBM, or XML.

Usage notes

• 1. Although contradictory, both meanings of the word acronym are in common use. The second sense is often criticized by commentators who prefer the term initialism for abbreviations that are not pronounced like an ordinary word.
• 2. Acronyms are generally written with all letters in upper case. Some acronyms are treated as words in their own right and are written in lower case (such as scuba or radar).
• 3. Older usage required that each letter be followed by a full stop. Current usage tends to omit full stops.[1]

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Acronyms and initialisms are abbreviations, such as NATO, laser, and IBM, that are formed using the initial letters of words or word parts in a phrase or name. Acronyms and initialisms are usually pronounced in a way that is distinct from that of the full forms for which they stand: as the names of the individual letters (as in IBM), as a word (as in NATO), or as a combination (as in IUPAC).

There is sharp disagreement on the difference in meaning between the terms acronym and initialism; see the "Nomenclature" section below. Another term, alphabetism, is sometimes used to describe abbreviations pronounced as the names of letters.

Nomenclature

Initialism originally described abbreviations formed from initials, without reference to pronunciation; but, during the mid 20th century, when such abbreviations saw more use than ever before, the word acronym was coined for abbreviations pronounced as words, such as NATO and AIDS. Of the names, acronym is the much more frequently used and known; many use it to describe any abbreviation formed from initial letters.

Acronyms as legendary etymology

It is not uncommon for acronyms to be cited in a kind of false etymology called a folk etymology for a word. Such etymologies persist in popular culture but have no scholarly basis in historical linguistics, and are examples of language-related urban legends. For example, cop is commonly cited as being supposedly derived from "constable on patrol," posh from "port out starboard home", and golf from "gentlemen only, ladies forbidden". Taboo words in particular commonly have such false etymologies: shit from "ship high in transit" and fuck from "for unlawful carnal knowledge."

Acronyms pronounced as words may be a 20th century phenomenon. Linguist David Wilton in Word Myths: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends states that "...forming words from acronyms is a distinctly twentieth (and now twenty-first)-Century phenomena. There is only one pre-twentieth-century word with an acronymic origin and it was in vogue only for a short time in 1886. The word is colinderies or colinda, an acronym for the Colonial and Indian Exposition held in London in that year.

Usage

Initialisms are used most often to abbreviate names of organizations and long or frequently referenced terms. The armed forces and government agencies frequently employ initialisms (and occasionally, acronyms), perhaps most famously in the "alphabet agencies" created by Franklin D. Roosevelt under the New Deal.

Jargon

Acronyms and initialisms often occur in jargon. An initialism may have different meanings in different areas of industry, writing, and scholarship. This has led some to obfuscate the meaning either intentionally, to deter those without such domain-specific knowledge, or unintentionally, by creating an initialism that already existed.

Punctuation

Traditionally, in English, abbreviations have been written with a full stop/period/point in place of the deleted part, although the colon and apostrophe have also had this role. In the case of most acronyms and initialisms, each letter is an abbreviation of a separate word and, in theory, should get its own termination mark. Such punctuation is diminishing with the belief that the presence of all-capital letters is sufficient to indicate that the word is an abbreviation.

Some influential style guides, such as that of the BBC, no longer require punctuation; some even proscribe it. 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] though some other sources are not so absolute in their pronouncements.

Nevertheless, some influential style guides, many of them American, still require periods in certain instances. The New York Times’ guide recommends separating each segment with a period when the letters are pronounced individually, as in K.G.B., but not when pronounced as a word, as in NATO.

When a multiple-letter abbreviation is formed from a single word, periods are generally proscribed, although they may be common in informal, personal usage. TV, for example, may stand for a single word (television or transvestite, for instance), and is generally spelled without punctuation (except in the plural). Although PS stands for the single word postscript (or the Latin postscriptum), it is often spelled with periods (P.S.). (Wikiquote abbreviates television as T.V.)

Case

Some style manuals also base the letters' case on their number. The New York Times, for example, keeps NATO in all capitals (while several guides in the British press may render it Nato), but uses lower case in Unicef (from "United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund") because it is more than four letters.

Some acronyms undergo assimilation into ordinary words, when they become common: for example, when technical terms become commonplace among 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 unknown to most speakers.

Pronunciation

The use of lower case can alternatively be dictated by the pronunciation of the acronym. Acronyms pronounced as words, e.g. Defra, are written with an initial capital, whereas where they are spelt out, e.g. ISBN, capitals are retained throughout. This is the style used in the Guardian.

Plurals and possessives

Template:Unreferenced The traditional style of pluralizing single letters with the addition of ’s (for example, B’s come after A’s) was extended to some of the earliest initialisms, which tended to be written with periods to indicate the omission of letters; some writers still pluralize initialisms in this way. Additionally, because an apostrophe can stand for missing letters, an abbreviation of compact discs, for example, can logically be rendered CD’s. Some style guides continue to require such apostrophes—perhaps partly to make it clear that the lower case s is only for pluralization and would not appear in the singular form of the word, for some acronyms and abbreviations do include lower case letters.

However, it has become common among many writers to inflect initialisms as ordinary words, using simple s, without an apostrophe, for the plural. In this case, compact discs becomes CDs. The logic here is that the apostrophe should be restricted to possessives: for example, the CD’s label (the label of the compact disc).

Multiple options arise when initialisms are spelled with periods and are pluralized: for example, compact discs may become C.D.’s, C.D’s, C.D.s, or CDs. Possessive plurals that also include apostrophes for mere pluralization and periods may appear especially complex: for example, the C.D.’s’ labels (the labels of the compact discs). Some see this as yet another reason to use apostrophes only for possessives and not for plurals. (In The New York Times, the plural possessive of G.I., which the newspaper prints with periods in reference to United States Army soldiers, is G.I.’s, with no apostrophe after the s.)

The argument that initialisms should have no different plural form (for example, "If D can stand for disc, it can also stand for discs") is generally disregarded because of the practicality in distinguishing singulars and plurals. This is not the case, however, when the abbreviation is understood to describe a plural noun already: for example, U.S. is short for United States, but not United State. In this case, the options for making a possessive form of an abbreviation that is already in its plural form without a final s may seem awkward: for example, U.S.’, U.S’, U.S.’s, etc. In such instances, possessive abbreviations are often foregone in favor of simple attributive usage (for example, the U.S. economy) or expanding the abbreviation to its full form and then making the possessive (for example, the United States' economy).

Abbreviations that come from single, rather than multiple, words—such as TV (television)—are pluralized both with and without apostrophes, depending on the logic followed: that the apostrophe shows the omission of letters and makes the s clear as only a pluralizer (TV’s); or that the apostrophe should be reserved for the possessive (TVs).

In some languages, the convention of doubling the letters in the initialism is used to indicate plural words: for example, the Spanish EE.UU., for Estados Unidos (United States). This convention is followed for a limited number of English abbreviations, such as pp. for pages (although this is actually derived from the Latin abbreviation for paginae), or MM for millions (frequently used in the petroleum industry).

Acronyms that are now always rendered in the lower case are pluralized as regular English nouns: for example, lasers.

When an initialism is part of a function in computing that is conventionally written in lower case, it is common to use an apostrophe to pluralize or otherwise conjugate the token. This practice results in sentences like "Be sure to remove extraneous dll’s" (more than one dll). In computer lingo, it is common to use the name of a computer program, format, or function, acronym or not, as a verb. In such verbification of abbreviations, there is confusion about how to conjugate: for example, if the verb IM (pronounced as separate letters) means to send (someone) an instant message, the past tense may be rendered IM’ed, IMed, IM’d, or IMd—and the third-person singular present indicative may be IM’s or IMs.

Numerals and constituent words

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: as in 4GL (Fourth generation language) or G77 (Group of 77). Large numbers may use metric prefixes, as with Y2K for "Year 2000." Exceptions using initials for numbers include TLA (three-letter acronym/abbreviation) and GoF (Gang of Four). Abbreviations using numbers for other purposes include repetitions, such as W3C ("World Wide Web Consortium"); pronunciation, such as B2B ("business to business"); and numeronyms, such as i18n ("internationalization"; 18 represents the 18 letters between the initial i and the final n).

In some cases, an acronym or initialism has been turned into a name, creating a pseudo-acronym. For example, the letters making up the name of the SAT (pronounced as letters) college entrance test 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 became AT&T (its parent/child, SBC, followed suit prior to its acquisition of AT&T and after its acquisition of a number of the other Baby Bells, changing from Southwestern Bell Corporation), Kentucky Fried Chicken became KFC, British Petroleum became BP to emphasize that it was no longer only an oil company (captured by its motto "beyond petroleum"), Silicon Graphics, Incorporated became SGI to emphasize that it was no longer only a computer graphics company. DVD now has no official meaning: its advocates couldn't agree on whether the initials stood for "Digital Video Disc" or "Digital Versatile Disc," and now both terms are used.

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. Similarly, "UBS" is the name of the merged Union Bank of Switzerland and Swiss Bank Corporation.

Rebranding can lead to redundant-acronym syndrome, as when Trustee Savings Bank became TSB Bank. A few high-tech companies have taken the redundant acronym to the extreme: for example, ISM Information Systems Management Corp. and SHL Systemhouse, Ltd. Another common example is RAM memory, which is redundant because RAM (random-access memory) includes the initial of the word memory. PIN stands for personal identification number, obviating the second word in PIN number. Other examples include ATM machine (Automatic Teller Machine machine), EAB bank (European American Bank bank), HIV virus (Human Immunodeficiency Virus virus) and the formerly redundant SAT test (Scholastic Achievement/Aptitude/Assessment Test test, now simply SAT Reasoning Test).

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.

When initialisms are defined in print, especially in the case of industry-specific jargon, the initial letters of the full words are often capitalized. While this is logical for proper nouns, such as Kentucky Fried Chicken, some usage writers have argued that it is technically incorrect for other terms, such as storage area network. Such capitalization is widespread in English publications; but "back-capitalization"—from SAN to give Storage Area Network, for example—is considered incorrect.Template:Fact

Non-English language

In Hebrew

People

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 the Besht, Rav Moshe ben Maimon (Maimonides) is commonly known as Rambam, and Rabbi Moshe ben Nahman (Nahmanides) likewise known as the Ramban.

Text

The usage of Hebrew acronyms extends to liturgical groupings: the word Tanakh is an acronym for Torah (Five Books of Moses), Nevi'im (Book of Prophets), and Ketuvim (Hagiographa).

Most often, though, one will find use of acronyms as acrostics, in both prayer, poetry (see Piyyut), and kabbalistic works. Because each Hebrew letter also has a numeric value, embedding an acrostic may give an additional layer of meaning to these works.

One purpose of acrostics was as a mnemonic or a way for an author to weave his name as a signature, or some other spiritual thought, into his work, at a time when much was memorized. Examples of prayers which contain acrostics include:

• Shokhen Ad - Lines are written so that letters line up vertically, spelling the name Yitzchak, which may refer to the patriarch Yitzchak, or to an unknown author.
• Ashrei - The first letter of every verse starts with a consecutive letter of the Hebrew alphabet

It is also a common part of Jewish thought to make inferences based on hidden acrostics. For example the Hebrew words for "man" (he: אישׁ) and "woman" (he: אשׁה) can be used to draw the inference that marriage, the joining of a man and a woman, is a spiritual relationship, because if one removes from each of the words "man" and "woman", one of the letters in the word "God" (he: י-ה), all that is left when "God" is removed from the joining of the two, is the word for destruction (he: אשׁ lit: fire) in place of each.

So much can be interpreted from Hebrew, and attributed to or inferred from it, that an interpretational system, called exegesis, has been developed along these lines.

A special punctuation mark, the gershayim (״), is used to denote acronyms. It is placed before the last letter in the abbreviation (e.g. תנ״ך for Tanakh).

The Tetragrammaton

Template:Main The Greek word tetragrammaton is used as a proper noun to describe the Hebrew spelling of the name of the Abrahamic god, יהוה (commonly transliterated as "YHVH", "YHWH", "Yahweh", or "Jehovah"), which Jews do not speak aloud, and protect when written (see Geniza). Scribes are prohibited from correcting, modifying, or erasing this word, or any series of four words which all begin, or all end, with these letters. Friday-night Shabbat Kiddush begins "Vay'hi Erev, Vay'hi Boker, Yom HaShishi. Vayachulu Hashamayim ..." Even though the first sentence is unnecessary to say, it would be breaking up the Tetragrammaton not to say it. The first four words, then, are completely unnecessary, but omitting them would make the next two words in some sense incomplete. Jews therefore whisper the first four words and say the rest out loud.

Agglutination

In languages where agglutination extends beyond plurals, various methods are used. A representative example is Finnish, where a colon is used to separate inflection from the letters:

• An acronym is pronounced as a word: Nato Template:IPA — Natoon Template:IPA "into Nato"
• An initialism is pronounced as letters: EU Template:IPA — EU:hun Template:IPA "into EU"
• An initialism is interpreted as words: EU Template:IPA — EU:iin Template:IPA "into EU"

Lenition

In languages such as Scottish Gaelic and Irish, where lenition (initial consonant mutation) is commonplace, acronyms must also be modified in situations where case and context dictate it. In the case of Scottish Gaelic, a lower case "h" is added after the initial consonant; for example, BBC Scotland in the genitive case would be written as BhBC Alba, with the acronym pronounced "VBC". Similarly, the Gaelic acronym for "television" (gd: telebhisean) is TBh, pronounced "TV", as in English.

In German

Mid-20th century German showed a tendency towards acronym-contractions of the Gestapo (for Geheime Staatspolizei) type: other examples are Hiwi (for Hilfswilliger, non-German volunteer in the German Army); Vopo (for Volkspolizist, member of police force in the DDR).

Examples

• pronounced as a word, containing only initial letters:
  • FNMA: (Fannie Mae) Federal National Mortgage Association
  • laser: light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation
  • NATO: North Atlantic Treaty Organisation
  • scuba: self-contained underwater breathing apparatus
• pronounced as a word, containing non-initial letters:
  • Amphetamine: Alpha-methyl-phenethylamine
  • Gestapo: Geheime Staatspolizei ("secret state police")
  • Interpol: International Criminal Police Organization
  • radar: radio detection and ranging
• pronounced as a word or names of letters, depending on speaker or context:
  • IRA: (Template:IPA or i ar a)
    • When used for Irish Republican Army, always pronounced as letters
    • When used for Individual Retirement Account, can be pronounced as letters or as a word
  • FAQ: (Template:IPA or ef a cue) frequently asked questions
  • SAT: (Template:IPA or es a tee) Scholastic Achievement (or Aptitude) Test(s)
  • SQL: (Template:IPA or ess cue ell) Structured Query Language
• pronounced as a combination of names of letters and a word:
  • CD-ROM: (see-dee-Template:IPA) Compact Disc read-only memory
  • IUPAC: (i-u-Template:IPA) International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry
  • JPEG: (jay-Template:IPA) Joint Photographic Experts Group
  • PDFORRA: (pee-dee-Template:IPA) Permanent Defence Forces Other

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 (Нииомтплабопармбетзелбетрабсбомонимонконотдтехстромонт). 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 GBU-43 Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb (MOAB) 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.Template:Fact Likewise titles are made up to form an existing word when shortened to an initialism. The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985, a health care bill, is better known as COBRA and the longish Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 was intentionally called so for its abbreviation, "USA PATRIOT Act". Sometimes a multi-word name or title is revised because its intuitive initialism is considered inappropriate, for example Verliebt in Berlin (ViB), a German telenovela, was first intended to be titled "Alles nur aus Liebe" resulting in "ANAL". Also, the Computer Literacy and Internet Technology qualification is known as CLAiT, rather than CLIT.[3]