Acronyms

Is there is a difference between acronyms and abbreviations?.

An acronym is usually formed by taking the first initials of a phrase or compounded-word and using those initials to form a word that stands for something. Dictionaries are saying that an acronym is a word formed from the first (or first few) letters of several words. Thus NATO, which we pronounce NATOH, is an acronym for North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and LASER (which we pronounce “lazer”), is an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. FBI, then, is not really an acronym for the Federal Bureau of Investigation; it is an abbreviation. AIDS is an acronym; HIV is an abbreviation. URL is an abbreviation for Uniform Resource Locator (World Wide Web address), but many people pronounce it as “Earl,” making it a true acronym, and others insist on pronouncing it as three separate letters, “U * R * L,” thus making it an abbreviation.

An abbreviation is the shortened form of something. It can be a word or a phrase. “I. Q”, for example, is the abbreviated form of “intelligence quotient”. Similarly, “St.” and “Mt.” stand for “saint” and “mount”. Here are some common abbreviations that we use in our everyday life: “Mr.”, “Mrs.”, and “Dr.”.

An acronym, unlike an abbreviation, is a word formed from the first letters of a series of words. “NATO” is an example of an acronym. It is formed from the words North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The first letter of every word has been used to form “NATO”. The dreaded disease “AIDS” is another example of an acronym. The full expansion of AIDS is “acquired immune deficiency syndrome”. “POTO” is also an acronym. Unlike an abbreviation, an acronym is usually pronounced as a word. You do not pronounce it letter by letter. The British Broadcasting Corporation is often abbreviated to BBC. We pronounce all three letters. In the case of acronyms like NATO and AIDS, we pronounce them as words.

It appears that there are no hard and fast rules for using periods in either acronyms or abbreviations. More and more, newspapers and journals seem to drop the periods: NAACP, NCAA, etc. Consistency, obviously, is important.

Some think that an abbreviation is merely the shortened form of a word. Acronyms and initialisms are specific types of abbreviations.

Acronyms and initialisms are abbreviations formed from the initial components in a phrase or a word. These components may be individual letters (as in CEO) or parts of words (as in Benelux and Ameslan). There is no universal agreement on the precise definition of the various terms (see nomenclature) nor on written usage (see orthographic styling). In English and most other languages, such abbreviations historically had limited use, but their coinage and use became much more common in the 20th century. As a type of word formation process, acronyms and initialisms are viewed as a subtype of blending.

Although the term acronym is widely used to describe any abbreviation formed from initial letters,[3] most dictionaries define acronym to mean “a word” in its original sense,[4][5][6] while some include additional senses attributing to acronym the same meaning as that of initialism.[7][8][9]

Initialisms were used in Rome before the Christian era. For example, the official name for the Roman Empire, and the Republic before it, was abbreviated as SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus). Inscriptions dating from antiquity, both on stone and on coins, use a lot of abbreviation and initialism to save room and work. For example, Roman first names, of which there was only a small set, were almost always abbreviated. Common terms were abbreviated too, such as writing just “F” for “filius”, meaning “son of”, a very common part of memorial inscriptions mentioning people. Grammatical markers were abbreviated or left out entirely if they could be inferred from the rest of the text.

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); some well-known examples from the United States are among the “alphabet agencies” (also jokingly referred to as “alphabet soup”) 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. One representative example, from the U.S. Navy, is COMCRUDESPAC, which stands for commander, cruisers destroyers Pacific; it’s also seen as “ComCruDesPac”. “YABA-compatible” (where YABA stands for “yet another bloody acronym”) is used to mean that a term’s acronym can be pronounced but is not an offensive word (e.g., “When choosing a new name, be sure it is “YABA-compatible”).[23]

The use of initialisms has been further popularized with the emergence of Short Message Systems (SMS). To fit messages into the 160-character limit of SMS, initialisms such as “GF” (girl friend), “LOL” (laughing out loud), and “DL” (download or down low) have been popularized into the mainstream.[24] Although prescriptivist disdain for such neologism is fashionable, and can be useful when the goal is protecting message receivers from crypticness, it is scientifically groundless when couched as preserving the “purity” or “legitimacy” of language; this neologism is merely the latest instance of a perennial linguistic principle—the same one that in the 19th century prompted the aforementioned abbreviation of corporation names in places where space for writing was limited (e.g., ticker tape, newspaper column inches).

Merriam-Webster, Inc. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, 1994. ISBN 0-87779-132-5. pp. 21–2:

acronyms A number of commentators (as Copperud 1970, Janis 1984, Howard 1984) believe that acronyms can be differentiated from other abbreviations in being pronounceable as words. Dictionaries, however, do not make this distinction because writers in general do not:

“The powder metallurgy industry has officially adopted the acronym ‘P/M Parts’” —Precision Metal Molding, January 1966.
“Users of the term acronym make no distinction between those pronounced as words … and those pronounced as a series of characters” —Jean Praninskas, Trade Name Creation, 1968.
“It is not J.C.B.’s fault that its name, let alone its acronym, is not a household word among European scholars” —Times Literary Supp. 5 February 1970.
“… the confusion in the Pentagon about abbreviations and acronyms—words formed from the first letters of other words” —Bernard Weinraub., N.Y. Times, 11 December 1978

Pyles & Algeo 1970 divide acronyms into “initialisms”, which consists of initial letters pronounced with the letter names, and “word acronyms”, which are pronounced as words. Initialism, an older word than acronym, seems to be too little known to the general public to serve as the customary term standing in contrast with acronym in a narrow sense.

^ a b “acronym”. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English (1991), Oxford University Press. p. 12: “a word, usu[ally] pronounced as such, formed from the initial letters of other words (e.g. Ernie, laser, Nato)”.
^ “acronym” “Webster’s Online Dictionary (2001)”, accessed Oct 7, 2008: Acronym “A word formed from the initial letters of a multi-word name.”
^ “acronym” “Cambridge Dictionary of American English”, accessed Oct 5, 2008: “a word created from the first letters of each word in a series of words.”
^ “acronym.” Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, accessed May 2, 2006: “a word (as NATO, radar, or laser) formed from the initial letter or letters of each of the successive parts or major parts of a compound term; also: an abbreviation (as FBI) formed from initial letters: see initialism ”
^ a b Crystal, David (1995). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-55985-5. p. 120: Its encyclopedic entry for Abbreviation contains an inset entitled “Types of Abbreviation”, which lists Initialisms, followed by Acronyms, which he describes simply as “Initialisms pronounced as single words” but then adds “However, some linguists do not recognize a sharp distinction between acronyms and initialisms, but use the former term for both.”
^ “acronym”. Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary (2003), Barnes & Noble. ISBN 0-7607-4975-2. “1. a word created from the first letter or letters of each word in a series of words or a phrase. 2. a set of initials representing a name, organization, or the like, with each letter pronounced separately, as FBI for Federal Bureau of Investigation.”