Dictionary Definition
acronym n : a word formed from the initial
letters of a multi-word name
User Contributed Dictionary
English
Etymology
From acro- "sharp, high" + -onym "name", modelled after homonym and synonym. From (akros) "extremity" and "name".Pronunciation
- /ˈæk.ɹə.nɪm/, /"
Extensive Definition
Acronyms, initialisms, and
alphabetisms are abbreviations that are
formed using the initial components in a phrase or name. These
components may be individual letters (as in CEO), and/or parts of
words (as in Benelux). There is
no universal agreement on the precise definition of the various
terms (see Nomenclature),
nor on written usage (see Orthographic
styling). While popular in recent English, such abbreviations
have
historical use in English, as well as other
languages. As a type of word
formation process, acronymy-initialisms are often viewed to be
a subtype of shortening processes (other shortening processes being
clipping
and backformation).
Nomenclature
Initialism originally
described abbreviations formed from initials, without reference to
pronunciation. The word acronym was coined in 1943 by Bell
Laboratories for abbreviations pronounced as words, such as
NATO,AIDS and Laser. Of the names,
acronym is the most frequently used and known; it is widely used to
describe any abbreviation formed from initial letters. Others
differentiate between the two terms, restricting acronym to
pronounceable words formed from components (letters, usually
initial, or syllables) of the constituent words, and using
initialism or alphabetism While initial letters are commonly used
to form an acronym, the original definition was a word made from
the initial letters or syllables of other words, for example
UNIVAC
from UNIVersal Automatic Computer. The word acronym itself comes
from Greek:
ἄκρος, akros, "topmost, extreme" + ὄνομα, onoma,
"name."
Despite the recent emergence
in English, earlier examples of acronyms in other languages exist.
The early Christians in
Rome used the
image of a fish as a symbol
for Jesus in
part because of an acronym—fish in Greek is ΙΧΘΥΣ (ichthys), which was said to
stand for (Iesous CHristos THeou (h) Uios Soter: Jesus Christ, Son
of God, Savior). Evidence of this interpretation dates from the
2nd
and 3rd centuries
and is preserved in the catacombs of Rome. And for
centuries, the Church has used the inscription INRI over the
crucifix, which stands for the Latin Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum
("Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews").
Initialisms were 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).
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 phenomenon. There is only one known
pre-twentieth-century word with an acronymic origin and it was in
vogue for only 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."
Early examples in English
- A.M. (Latin ante meridiem, "before noon") and P.M. (Latin post meridiem, "after noon")
- O.K., a term of disputed origin, dating back at least to the early 19th century, now used around the world
- n.g., for "no good," from 1838
- B.C. stands for Before Christ, and A.D. for Anno Domini, Latin for "In the year of our Lord"
- The etymology of the word alphabet itself comes to Middle English from the Late Latin Alphabetum, which in turn derives from the Ancient Greek Alphabetos, from alpha and beta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet. Colloquially, learning the alphabet is called learning one's ABCs.
Current use
Acronyms and 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) (a well known English-language example
being the "alphabet
agencies" created by Franklin
D. Roosevelt under the New Deal).
Business and industry also are prolific coiners of acronyms and
initialisms. The rapid advance of science and technology in recent
centuries seems to be an underlying force driving the usage, as new
inventions and concepts with multiword names create a demand for
shorter, more manageable names.
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.Acronyms as legendary etymology
seealso backronym 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."Orthographic styling
Punctuation
Showing the ellipsis of letters
Traditionally, in English,
abbreviations have been written with a full
stop/period/point in place of the deleted part to show the
ellipsis of letters, 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.
Ellipsis-is-understood style
Some influential style guides,
such as that of the BBC, no longer require
punctuation to show ellipsis; 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", though some other sources are not so absolute in their
pronouncements.
Pronunciation-dependent style
Nevertheless, some influential
style
guides, many of them American,
still require periods in certain instances. For example, 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. The logic of
this style is that the pronunciation is reflected graphically by
the punctuation scheme.
Other conventions
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.)
The slash
(aka virgule) (/) is often used to show the ellipsis of letters in
the initialism N/A (not applicable, not available).
Representing plurals and possessives
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. 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
lowercase 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 that the correct usage of
apostrophes is only for possessives and not for plurals. In some
instances, however, it is recognized that using an apostrophe can
increase clarity, for example if the final letter of an acronym is
an S, as in SOS's, or when writing the plural form of an
abbreviation with periods (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.)
A particularly rich source of
options arises when the plural of an initialism would normally be
indicated in a word other than the final word if spelled out in
full. A classic example is Member of Parliament, which in plural is
Members of Parliament. It is possible then to abbreviate this as
M’s P.
(or similar ), as famously by
a former Australian Prime Minister . This usage is less common than
forms with "s" at the end, such as MPs, and may appear dated or
pedantic.
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). On the other hand, in colloquial
speech the pronunciation United States’s is sometimes
used.
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). However despite the pervasiveness of this
practice, it is generally held to be technically incorrect; the
preferred method being to simply append an s, without the
apostrophe.
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.
Case
All-caps style
The most common capitalization scheme
seen with acronyms and initialisms is all-uppercase (all-caps),
except for those few that have linguistically taken on an identity
as regular words, with the acronymous etymology of the words fading
into the background of common knowledge, such as has occurred with
the words scuba, laser, and radar.
Small-caps variant
Small caps are
sometimes used in order to make the run of capital letters seem
less jarring to the reader. For example, the style of some American
publications, including the Atlantic
Monthly and USA Today, is
to use small caps for acronyms and initialisms longer than three
letters; thus "U.S." and "FDR"
in normal caps, but "" in small caps. The initialisms "" and
""
are often smallcapped as well, as in: "From 4004 to
525."
Pronunciation-dependent style
On the copyediting
end of the publishing industry, where the aforementioned
distinction between acronyms (pronounced as a word) and initialisms
(pronounced as a series of letters) is usually maintained, some
publishers choose to use cap/lowercase (c/lc) styling for acronyms,
reserving all-caps styling for initialisms. Thus Nato and Aids
(c/lc), but USA and FBI (caps). For example, this is the style used
in The
Guardian, and BBC News
typically edits to this style. The logic of this style is that the
pronunciation is reflected graphically by the capitalization
scheme.
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, and to style it in
caps might look ungainly (flirting with the appearance of "shouting
capitals").
Back-capitalization
When initialisms are defined
in print, especially in the case of industry-specific jargon, the initial letters of
the full words are often capitalized, even when the
expanded meaning is not a proper noun. This convention is
pedagogically useful, because it quickly and efficiently draws the
reader's attention to convey the idea "Notice that the acronym is
derived from these letters", without circumlocuting to point out
that fact. This is even more useful in cases where certain words
contribute more than one letter to the acronym, which the
letter-case differentiation can easily communicate. (For example, a
writer can write, "MARC
stands for MAchine Readable Cataloging.")
However, a problem lies in
differentiating such pedagogical use from the usual purpose of
"Title Case" capitalization, which is to mark a proper noun (for
example, a brand name).
Pedagogical temporary capitalization can inadvertently teach
readers to think that the phrase is a proper noun, and to think
that it should always be capitalized, which in cases such as
storage
area network is incorrect. This produces a drift toward
spurious proper-noun status that can be called back-capitalization
(by analogy to back-formation).
One way to avoid this
miscommunication born of ambiguity is to achieve the pedagogical
effect with bold or italic formatting of the lowercase letters,
rather than with back-capitalization. For example, instead of
writing, "SAN stands for Storage Area Network," it is less
ambiguous to write, "SAN stands for storage area
network."
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).
Changes to (or word play on) the expanded meaning
Pseudo-acronyms
In some cases, an acronym or initialism has been redefined as a nonacronymous 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.Pseudo-acronyms 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.
Recursive acronyms and RAS syndrome
Rebranding can lead to redundant-acronym syndrome syndrome, as when Trustee Savings Bank became TSB Bank, or when Railway Express Agency became REA Express. 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), Microsoft's NT Technology (New Technology Technology) and the formerly redundant SAT test (Scholastic Achievement/Aptitude/Assessment Test test, now simply SAT Reasoning Test).Simple redefining: replacement of the expanded meaning
Sometimes, the initials
continue to stand for an expanded meaning, but the original meaning
is simply replaced. Some examples:
- GAO changed the full form of its name from General Accounting Office to Government Accountability Office.
- SADD changed the full form of its name from Students Against Driving Drunk to Students against Destructive Decisions.
- The OCLC changed the full form of its name from Ohio College Library Center to Online Computer Library Center.
- YM originally stood for Young Miss, and later Young & Modern, but now stands for simply Your Magazine.
- WWF originally stood for World Wildlife Fund, but now stands for Worldwide Fund for Nature (although the former name is still used in the US)
- RAID used to mean Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives, but is now commonly interpreted as Redundant Array of Independent Drives.
Backronyms
A backronym (or bacronym) is a phrase that is constructed "after the fact" from a previously existing word, initialism, or acronym. For example, critics of the Ford Motor Company often humorously refer to Ford as being an acronym for phrases such as "fix or repair daily" or "found on road dead".Most backronym formation
occurs in the (linguistic) wild owing either to humor or to
ignorance of an acronym's original meaning. The novelist and critic
Anthony
Burgess once proposed that the word "book" ought to stand for
"Box Of Organised Knowledge." One artificial type of backronym
formation is when an acronym's official meaning is crafted to
retrofit an existing acronym whose original meaning sounded less
"official". This process could be described as a species of
bowdlerism.
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 (or recently
was) the largest conventional bomb in the world; it is widely
assumed that the "mother of all bombs" phrase was the original
meaning of the MOAB acronym, being a snowclone of the earlier
phrase "Mother of all Xs".
Contrived acronyms
A contrived acronym is an
acronym that has been deliberately designed in such a way that it
will be especially apt as a name for the thing being named (such as
by having a dual meaning or by borrowing the positive connotations
of an existing word). Some examples of contrived acronyms are
USA
PATRIOT, CAPTCHA, and
ACT UP. The clothing company
French Connection began referring to itself as FCUK, supposedly
standing for "French Connection United Kingdom." They then created
t-shirts and several advertising campaigns that exploit the
acronym's similarity to the taboo word "fuck". Other companies have done
the same thing with FUCT or FUKT (sounds like "fucked"). See the
list of fictional espionage organizations for more examples of
contrived acronyms.
Some acronyms are chosen
deliberately to avoid a name considered undesirable: for example,
Verliebt
in Berlin (ViB), a German telenovela, was first
intended to be Alles nur aus Liebe (All for Love), but was changed
to avoid the resultant acronym ANAL. Similarly, the Computer
Literacy and Internet Technology qualification is known as CLAiT,
rather than CLIT.
Contrived acronyms differ from
backronyms in that
they were originally conceived with the artificial expanded
meaning, while backronyms' expansion is spurious — invented later
as a joke, or as a guess at what the original expansion may have
been.
Non-English language
In Hebrew
It's common to take more than just one initial letter from each of the words composing the acronym; regardless of this, the abbreviation sign is always written next to the last letter, even if by this it separates letters of the same original word. Examples: ארה"ב (for ארצות הברית, the United States); ברה"מ (for ברית המועצות, the Soviet Union); ראשל"צ (for ראשון לציון, Rishon LeZion); ביה"ס (for בית הספר, the school).Typography
Hebrew typography uses a special punctuation mark called Gershayim (״) to denote acronyms, placing the sign between the second-last and last letters of the non-inflected form of the acronym (e.g. "Report", singular: "דו״ח"; plural: "דו״חות"); initialisms are denoted using the punctuation mark Geresh (׳) by placing the sign after the last letter of the initialism (e.g. "Ms.": "׳בג"). However, in practice, single and double quotes are often used instead of the special punctuation marks, with the single quote used both in acronyms and initialisms.If the acronym is read as is,
then the spelling should be with a final form
letter. If, on the other hand, the acronym is read as the complete
phrase or read as the individual letters, then it should be spelled
with a medial form letter. In practice, this rule is more often
then not ignored, and the acronyms spelled either way.
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 (Hebrew: בעש״ט), Rav Moshe ben Maimon (Maimonides) is commonly known as Rambam (Hebrew: רמב״ם), Rabbi Shlomo ben Yitzchak is known as Rashi, and Rabbi Moshe ben Nahman (Nahmanides) is likewise known as the Ramban (Hebrew: רמב״ן).Text
The usage of Hebrew acronyms extends to liturgical groupings: the word Tanakh (Hebrew: תנ״ך) 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.
Pronunciation
In Hebrew, the abbreviations are commonly pronounced with the sound "a" inserted between the consonants: ש״ס Shas, תנ״ך Tanakh, שב״כ Shabak, רמב״ם Rambam. (An exception is אצ״ל Etzel.)When one of the letters is
vav
or yud, these may be read
as vowels ("u" and "i") instead: דו״ח (duah = דין וחשבון, judgement
and account); סכו״ם (sakum = סכין כף ומזלג, knife spoon and fork);
תפו״ז (tapuz = תפוח זהב, golden apple); או״ם (um = האומות המאוחדות,
the United
Nations); ביל״ו Bilu; לח״י Lehi. (An
exception is בית״ר Beitar.)
Hebrew numbers (e.g. year
numbers in the Hebrew
calendar) are written the same way as acronyms, with gershayim
before the last character, but pronounced as separate letter names:
e.g. תשס״ח (Hebrew year 2007–2008) is
tav-shin-samekh-khet.
Declension
In languages where nouns are
declined, various
methods are used. An example is Finnish, where a colon is used to
separate inflection from the letters:
- An acronym is pronounced as a word: Nato [nato] — Natoon [natoːn] "into Nato"
- An initialism is pronounced as letters: EU [eː uː] — EU:hun [eː uːhun] "into EU"
- An initialism is interpreted as words: EU [euroːpan unioni] — EU:iin [euroːpan unioniːn] "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 toward
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 GDR);
Mufuti or MuFuTi (Multifunktionstisch - multi functional table in
the GDR).
In Asian languages
In English
language discussion of languages with syllabic or logographic writing systems
(such as Chinese,
Japanese,
and Korean),
acronym describes short forms that take the first character of each
multi-character element. For example, Beijing
University—Beijing Daxue (literally, North-Capital
Great-Learning 北京大学)—is widely known as Beida (literally,
North-Great 北大). In describing such languages, the term initialism
is inapplicable.
There is also a widespread use of acronyms and
initialisms in Indonesia in
every aspect of social life. For example, the Golkar political
party stands for Partai Golongan Karya, Monas stands for
"Monumen Nasional" (National Monument), the Angkot public transport
stands for "Angkutan Kota", warnet stands for "warung internet" or
internet cafe, and many others.
Extremes
- 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." Another term COMNAVSEACOMBATSYSENGSTA which stands for "Commander, Naval Sea Systems Combat Engineering Station" is longer but the word "Combat" is not shortened. This has led to many heated discussions on the midwatch regarding which is the longer acronym.
- 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."
See also
- -onym
- Internet slang
- Acronym Finder
- List of abbreviations
- List of acronyms and initialisms
- RAS syndrome (Redundant Acronym Syndrome syndrome)
- Three letter acronym
- Acrostic
- backronym
- pseudo-acronym
- recursive acronym
- syllabic abbreviation
- Acronyms in the Philippines
- Acronyms in healthcare
- Portmanteau
- List of fictional espionage organizations
- Amalgamation (names)
References
External links
- Abbreviations.com - a human edited database of acronyms and abbreviations
- Acronym Finder - a human edited database of acronyms and abbreviations (over 550,000 entries)
- All Acronyms - collection of acronyms and abbreviations (more than 600,000 definitions)
- The Great Abbreviations & Acronyms Hunt - three letter and four letter abbreviations
acronym in Afrikaans: Akroniem
acronym in Tosk Albanian: Akronym
acronym in Belarusian (Tarashkevitsa):
Акронім
acronym in Bulgarian: Акроним
acronym in Catalan: Acrònim
acronym in Czech: Akronym
acronym in Danish: Akronym
acronym in German: Akronym
acronym in Estonian: Akronüüm
acronym in Modern Greek (1453-):
Αρκτικόλεξο
acronym in Spanish: Sigla
acronym in Esperanto: Akronimo
acronym in Basque: Akronimo
acronym in French: Acronymie
acronym in Galician: Acrónimo
acronym in Korean: 두문자어
acronym in Ido: Akronimo
acronym in Indonesian: Akronim
acronym in Icelandic: Upphafsstafaheiti
acronym in Italian: Acronimo
acronym in Hebrew: ראשי תיבות
acronym in Luxembourgish: Akronym
acronym in Hungarian: Betűszó
acronym in Dutch: Acroniem
acronym in Japanese: 頭字語
acronym in Norwegian: Akronym
acronym in Occitan (post 1500): Acronim
acronym in Low German: Akronym
acronym in Polish: Skrótowiec
acronym in Portuguese: Acrónimo
acronym in Romanian: Acronim
acronym in Russian: Акроним
acronym in Sardinian: Acrònimu
acronym in Sicilian: Acrònimu
acronym in Simple English: Acronym
acronym in Slovak: Akronym
acronym in Slovenian: Akronim
acronym in Swedish: Akronym
acronym in Thai: อักษรย่อ
acronym in Vietnamese: Từ viết tắt từ chữ
đầu
acronym in Yiddish: ראשי תיבות
acronym in Chinese: 首字母縮略字