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Acronym



         


An acronym (Greek ακρον, akron, "tip" + ονυμα, onyma, "name") is one type of abbreviation formed from the initial letter or letters of words. The term is often further restricted to abbreviations which can be pronounced as words (e.g. NATO). Under this more restricted sense of acronym, those abbreviations which are instead pronounced as a series of single letters (e.g. HTML) are classed as initialisms, and not as acronyms.

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Writing acronyms

Traditionally, abbreviations use a period (full stop) to mark the part that was deleted. In the case of acronyms, each letter is its own abbreviation, and in theory should get its own 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 usage guides still insist on the many-periods treatment, such as the one used by the New York Times, but others — most notably, at the BBC — no longer require this. (See the BambooWeb article: abbreviation.)

Some acronyms undergo assimilation into ordinary words: 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 and laser, for instance. The term anacronym has been coined as a portmanteau of the words "anachronism" and "acronym" to describe acronyms whose original meaning is forgotten.

Sometimes non-initial letters, and the initials of short function words (such as "and", "or", "of", or "to") are included in the acronym to make it pronounceable, in contradiction to the normal rule for abbreviation. Additionally, abbreviations like "Interpol" and "Gestapo" that consist mostly of non-initial letters of constituent words are often called acronyms, although some people class them instead as portmanteaus. When distinguishing between these abbreviations and "classical" acronyms, the term alphabeticism is sometimes used to describe the latter.

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, especially when the acronym is pronounced as separate letters. However, today it is more usual to inflect them like ordinary words; thus the usual plural of "CD" is "CDs", with "CD's" being reserved for the possessive.

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Acronym use

Acronyms are a relatively new linguistic phenomenon, having only become popular during the 20th century. As literacy rates soared, the practice of referring to words by their first letters became increasingly convenient. The first organization to use them heavily was the United States bureaucracy under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (who was himself dubbed "FDR") in the 1930s. For example, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration was frequently shortened to "FERA" in official documents. Nonetheless, earlier examples of acronyms exist: for example 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 Uios Soter: Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior). Evidence of this interpretation dates from the second and third centuries and is preserved in the catacombs of Rome.

Acronyms 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. Cynics have quipped that acronyms are used to obfuscate.

The longest acronym according to the 1965 edition of the Acronyms, Initialisms and Abbreviations Dictionary is ADCOMSUBORDCOMPHIBSPAC, a United States Navy term that stands for "Administrative Command, Amphibious Forces, Pacific Fleet Subordinate Command". However, if initialisms are also counted as acronyms, even longer "acronyms" exist.

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Spy thrillers

During the 1960s trend for action-adventure spy thrillers, it was a common practice for fictional spy organizations or their nemesis to employ names that were acronyms. Sometimes these acronyms made sense but most of the time, they were words incongrously 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 cliches of the spy thriller genre. Some of the most popular were:

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Initialisms

Originally all abbreviations formed out of the initials of the contained words were called initialism, a term which first saw use around the 1890s. Around the 1940s, the word acronym was coined to describe a subset of initialisms: acronym at this point was still restricted in meaning to "initialisms which form pronouncable words". During the 1960s, when initialisms and acronyms saw more use than ever before, some people began to extend the meaning of acronym to all initialisms, at which point the word initialism was restricted in sense to its current meaning.

In some circles, many people therefore feel the word acronym can be applied to any set of initials: any abbreviation formed out of the initials of the contained words is an acronym, regardless of whether or not the abbreviation can be pronounced as a word. Under this definition initialisms are not a distinct type of abbreviation, but rather a subset of acronyms. This definition has no word to refer to acronyms which are not initialisms.

The opposing view is that abbreviations like "BBC" and "IBM" cannot be pronounced as single words, and therefore are not acronyms. Under this more exclusionary definition of "acronym" initialisms are a distinct category of abbreviations, and there is no single English word to describe both types of abbreviation.

Under the linguistic, restricted definition of acronym, there is some confusion on how to class abbreviations which contain single letters but can otherwise be pronounced as a word, such as JPEG (Jay-Peg). Many refer to these as acronyms, although a case can be made for classing them as initialisms instead. Sometimes these abbreviations are referred to as acronym-initialism hybrids.

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Examples of acronyms

For a list of initialisms, see its own article.

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Humorous Example of an Acronym

A definition for the word acronym can in itself become an acronym spelled acronym. Abbreviated Coded Rendition Of a Name Yielding Meaning. Turn that definition of acronym into an acronym, and the resulting acronym is ACRONYM. More humorous definitions of acronym exist, see the list at .

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See also

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