Literature and references
We will begin with the history and the sources of our data, before turning to the scholarship, terminology, and taxonomy. It is well known that such items go back several millennia, with abbreviations even occurring in Sumerian. The desire to economize is seen in numerous He-brew examples like MILH ‘Mi Iolh Lnv Hshmilh (Who shall go up for us to heaven?)’ and Roman ones like SPQR ‘Senatus populusque Romanuis’ and INRI ‘Jesus Nazarenus Rex Judaeorum’. Old English borrowed from Latin what became the modern ampersand. The seventeenth-century English cabal was associated with five committee members’ names, of which their first letters could be arranged to spell a variant of the borrowing kabbahah (Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale-see Algeo 1975, 217-18). Early forms of dictionaries of initialisms (a variously defined term that we will employ as a general rubric for acronyms and abbreviations) appeared in the fifteenth century. Perhaps the first was the famous Modus 99 100 AMERICAN SPEECH 64.2 (1989) LegendiA bbreviaturas(1 475?), 277 folio leaves of two 38-line columns that recorded many visual devices rather than true lexemes/words, as they were evidently pronounced as the whole word instead of as a reduced form. Thus there are gle ‘generale’ and nobc ‘nobiscum’. There were Walther’s 459-page folio LexiconD iplomaticum( 1745) and Feutry’s Manuel tironien (1775), consisting of 424 pages of visual devices like agrsn ‘agression’, with clippings like Aar ‘Aaron’ but few true abbreviations like c ‘ce’. In his Preface he noted that his purpose was to correct “le defaut de leur uniformite,” which was “un tres grand inconvenient.” Chassant’s 136-page Dictionnaire des abreviations (1846) continued use of both the ultimately Latin word abbreviation and the classical practice of treating clippings as abbreviations. Like Modus Legendi Abbreviaturas,it was widely used in Europe, going into a fifth edition in 1884.
The first book-length collections of English initialisms may have been Courtenay’s 3,000-item, 53-page pamphlet and Macgregor’s 40-page one. Both published in 1855, they included numbers of clippings like Brit. and chron. T.W.W.’s general English collection (1873) is noteworthy because it is one of the few abbreviations dictionaries where entries are given citations. Next came Fallows (1883) and the anonymous Dictionary of Abbreviations(1 886) containing nearly 2,500 items. Abbreviations were beginning to serve specialized groups, as shown by Martin’s Latin and French abbreviations used in English historical manuscripts (1892), and by Cordingley’s mer-cantile collection (1902). So many abbreviations were being used so frequently in England that De La Rue (1867) compiled a brief list for the Smithsonian Annual Report, including common items like A.B., D.C.L., and J.P. American abbrevia-tions like C.O.D., N.G., O.K., and P.D.Q. were appearing, a procedure which Mencken (1919, 22) proudly described as “the characteristic American habit of reducing complex concepts to the starkest abbreviations.”
By the late nineteenth century, additional hundreds were appearing. One of the earliest American collections was Wilson’s, which added “Abbreviations and Representative Letters” in the second edition (1850). Though the list was in the appendix to this very popular book on punctuation, it was still prominent as of the thirty-first edition in 1899. So many collections were appearing that Rogers (1913) commented in his preface on the “many smaller but most useful works, both English and foreign,” which he incorporated into his 30-year project. The number of abbreviations was expanded more systematically during World War One, as Americans had long been using reduced forms to name business, governmental, and daily activities (Riordan 1947, 108). Kirby (1918) divided his military abbreviations into American, British,
ABBREVIATIONS IN WORD-FORMATION 101 French, German, and general ones. Among many clippings were abbreviations like A.B.&Q. ‘appropriation for barracks and quarters’. Con-temporary word lists in Dialect Notes contained a sprinkling of abbreviations like U ‘university’, C ‘cocaine’, and M ‘morphine’ (e.g., Wittman 1914, 125; Wells 1922, 182). Long (1915) collected 32 abbreviations like w.c. There were a few British acronyms like D.O.R.A., Waac, and Anzac. The 1930s witnessed more deliberate, larger supplies from F.D.R.’s alphabet agencies; but acronyms were still comparatively few. Contemporary college initialisms included Y, Y.M.C.A., R.O.T.C., and S.A.E. amid many clippings like dorm and trig, but few like Deke ‘D.K.E., Delta Kappa Epsilon’ (Schultz 1930). The real explosion in systematically created initialisms began with World War Two. The many new items, including informal and obscene ones like F.O. and S.O.S., prompted the U.S. War Department’s two official lists, particularly Technical Manual 20-205. The Manual became part of Army Regulations, with a succession of updated revisions entitled Authorized Abbreviations, Brevity Codes, and Acronyms( 1985). This lists the official initialisms and the policy and places for their use.
The most regulated of the many specialized collections, it includes numerous long items like USAMSMADHS (which surpasses the longest item in our corpus) ‘United States Army Medical Service Meat and Dairy Hygiene School’. Meanwhile, American Speech became a treasure house of the new items in World War Two. The U.S. Army’s seven-page “Glossary of Army Slang” (1941, 163-69) recorded a scattering of items like A.A. About half of the Army and Navy Journal’s radar nomenclature was abbreviations (1945, 309-10). Hornstein’s two collections (1945, 150-51; 1946, 73- 75) had a few like KIA and others like DP’s, as did Dunlap’s “G.I. Lingo” (1945, 147-48). Berger (1945, 258-64) included numerous abbreviations in an illuminating article, as did Riordan’s “G.I. Alphabet” (1947, 108-14) and Fleece’s compounds made from FU (1946, 70-72).
Russell’s “Among the New Words” (1946, 137-45, 220-26) listed many more. Howson (1945, 125) regretted the prematurity of Shankle’s 207-page CurrentA bbreviations( 1945), as the war was generating such items daily. Clearly, F.D.R.’s alphabetical names had prepared Americans for un-derstanding and creating initialisms in large numbers. Russell (1946, 220) noted that Merriam added 72 initialisms to the 1945 supplement to Webster’s Second (1934) that were not in the 1939 one, and speculated that they had now become part of the general American lexicon. He extrapolated from several sources: Webster’s Second st able of 5,000 abbreviations was less than 1% of the 550,000 entries stated to be in that dictionary, Mencken’s Supplement I contained only about .8%
102 AMERICAN SPEECH 64.2 (1989) abbreviations, and Parry’s War Dictionary (1942) contained 1.8%. Yet the two 1945 Yearbooks contained 14.5%. Russell concluded that if even half of these survived, such items would be playing the largest role in word formation to date (1946, 138-39). In 1943-66, the Merriam Company and an American Dialect Society committee compiled lists of new words and new meanings, which was published annually in the Britannica Book of the Year and later classified according to date (Versand c. 1973, 179-221).
The total 202 acronyms included 71 in 1943-47, 44 in 1948- 52, 37 in 1953-57, 30 in 1958-62, and 20 in 1963-66. Robbins (1951) collected 126 oral and written initialisms from aviation alone. Greatly larger numbers have since belied the several assertions that initialisms are a minor lexical process which mainly produces proper names that are a minor source of new words peripheral to the general vocabulary (e.g., Barber 1964, 97; and Huddleston 1984, 229). Certainly some older items like Ala and secy ‘secretary’ shed no light on morphology or lexical theory; they belong in encyclopedias, atlases, and other reference works. However, Thomas Matthews Pearce expansively predicted that the atomic age will make English a language of acronyms (quoted in Time, 11 Aug. 1947, 22); and 17% of Bryant’s space-exploration col-lection (1968, 172-81) were initialisms.
Most were abbreviations like AAP and AVCS; her 37 initialisms were in second place behind the 103 com-pounds. Crowley and Sheppard’s 1987 edition of Gale’s Acronyms, Ini-tialisms,& Abbreviations Dictionaryh ad the subtitle “A guide to more than 400,000 acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, alphabetic symbols, and similar condensed appellations,” most of which were iden-tified with the United States. Today, every person is skillfully creating initialisms with gusto.
Over the centuries, the purpose of creating initialisms also has changed from the original medieval need for economy and efficiency (scarce pa-per and time). As Hamilton noted in his preface (1918): “The use of ABBREVIATIONS IN WORD-FORMATION 103 abbreviations and signs is often a convenience and sometimes a temptation. It is a saving of time and labor which is entirely justifiable under certain conditions.” A few early individuals had envisioned initialisms as an unstigmatized, vital part of technical vocabularies. Thus Parkhurst philosophized in his preface (1917): Symbols really constitute a language in themselves. A few characters, suggestive to a marked degree, replace from six to many times six the number of letters that would ordinarily be required to describe the same thing, or combination of things, in the usual words. One memorizes these characters….
After the mind becomes trained to the habit of thinking in the symbol language, and this is an exceedingly easy and quick thing to master, it becomes instinctive to talk in the symbol language. Today we find updated collections of initialisms in most subject fields and a recognized need for efficient items to serve the ever-growing busi-ness community and organizations. As initialisms became fashionable in various contexts, items like US(A), USSR, and MIT superseded the full forms (see Partridge and Clark 1951, 221; Adams 1973, 201; Barber 1964, 97; and Malkiel 1968, 373). The originally condemnatory attitude was slower to change.
Wilson (1856) tagged some abbreviations that appeared “unsuitable, either in consequence of their being already employed for other words, because they are less intelligible than they should be, or have but slight authority for their adoption.” He warned that few could be used in ordinary com-position, just as contractions were eschewed; but he recommended them for catalogues, directories, tables, and family registers. His list (272-300) totaled about 1,200 abbreviations. Boss (1880) also objected to the in-discriminate use of such devices.
Years later, Daniel (1946) and also the New York Times (28 Nov. 1946) attacked the use of initialisms, which was said to produce a sensation like eating dehydrated food; F.D.R.’s AAA was bad enough, but now Russian-style AGRADAD and UOPWA were taking over. Time next took up the cudgel. The originally playful sport was said to have become contagion and verbal smog, and the horrible ultimate was still nowhere in sight (“Acronymous Society” 1961).
The last straw was EPDOPAC ‘Enlisted Personnel Distribution Office- Pacific Fleet’. Such items were condemned as hazards, as when Gale listed eighteen different interpretations for the sequence AID; people do not want to clutter their memories with clusters of letters (“Agonies of Acronymania” 1971). Some Britishers were also alarmed. Jamieson (1968, 473-74) said that the disease had reached epidemic proportions, into every field of human endeavor. His attack was carefully argued. Acronym-producers claim that the item can be “a convenient code for some
104 AMERICAN SPEECH 64.2 (1989) particularly lengthy or cumbersome phrase,” whereas it is likely to be meaningless, often ambiguous, sometimes unpronounceable, and ugly instead of euphonic. The twentieth-century popularity of initialisms is demonstrated by the increasing numbers and size of dictionaries, some of which have gone into profitable later editions, not to mention the expanding number of specialized dictionaries.
Following the nineteenth-century collections, there were three early twentieth-century ones (Latham 1904, Dobbs 1911, Rogers 1913). Dobbs’s book was noteworthy because he remarked in his Editor’s Note that multi meanings were already so well established that his 10,000 entries required him to list about 50,000 meanings. Five collections appeared during the World War Two period (Partridge 1942, Stephenson 1943, Shankle 1945, Allen 1946, Matthews 1947).
Four-teen dictionaries of general initialisms have since appeared, most of which used the traditional term abbreviations in their titles (Buttress 1954, Schwartz 1955, De Sola 1958, Acronyms Dictionary 1960, Mayberry 1961, Fawcett 1963, Goldstein 1963, Moser 1964, Gurnett and Kyte 1966, Wilkes 1966, Kleiner 1971, Paxton 1974, Webster 1985, Miller 1988). De Sola’s book has reached an “augmented, international” seventh edition (1986). Gale’s Acronyms Dictionary began with 1,200 items in 1960 and has steadily expanded, to 130,000 in 1976, 300,000 in 1984, and 425,000 in Crowley and Sheppard’s twelfth edition (1987). Such collections are necessary, as Roosevelt’s “alphabet soup” would now pale in comparison even to the much-thicker “soup” used by computer professionals. Insiders at almost every computer hardware and software company use many acronyms and numerous abbreviations.
There are now general regional dictionaries like Wilkes’s British one (1966) and Jones’s Australian one (1977). Also, since World War Two, numerous items from languages with alphabetic writing systems have moved into worldwide use. We find GUM ‘Gosydarstvenniy Universalni Magazine’, TASS, the German counterpart DANA ‘Deutsche Allgemeine Nachrichten Agentur’, the French CERN ‘Conseil europeen de recherche nuclkare’, and others (Potter 1969, 80).
Measurements are often international, as in kg. The number of dictionaries of general foreign initialisms has also ex-panded, as in Portuguese (Froes 1961), French (Dubois 1977), Russian (Scheitz 1986), German (Wendt 1967), general foreign language (Jung 1985), and international (Sheppard and Towell 1987), plus other collections for Finnish, Flemish, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, Macedonian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Swedish. Spillner’s extensive bibliography (1970-72) lists many German dictionaries. In just 75 years, the number of initialisms in numerous languages worldwide has exploded from tens of thousands to perhaps 800,000 recorded in dictionaries, besides those that are still unrecorded.
One revealing comparison is Gale’s 1987 edition and Stephenson’s 1943 col-lection, the reprinting of Martin’s 1892 collection (London: Stevens, 1949) and Rogers’ 1913 one (Detroit: Gale, 1969), and particularly the reprinting of Chassant’s fifth edition (New York: Franklin, Burt, 1973), probably the most famous of all dictionaries of abbreviations.
Interestingly, lexicographers seldom disagree about whether an item is an abbreviation or an acronym. As there are only two such examples in our corpus, we have not adopted Gramley and Pitzold’s proposal (1985, 332) for a category containing initialisms that are pronounced by some speakers as abbreviations, and by others as acronyms.
One example is CAD ‘computer-aided design’, which structural engineers use as an acronym (and Random House so records it), whereas Barnhart et al. classifies it as an abbreviation. The other is VAT, which Gramley and Patzold classifies as “Abkurzung und Akronym” (Oxford provides both etymologies). To avoid a double tabulation, we have arbitrarily classified CAD and VAT as abbreviations, as Barnhart et al. does on the basis of their data; but it is true that there are a few other such items (RAF and ROTC, though the latter has a somewhat pejorative meaning).
ASP in Barn-hart et al. The abbreviation means ‘American Selling Price’, but the acronym means ‘Anglo-Saxon Protestant’.
continuing change in English acronyms over recent decades has widened the parameters of that category. Only 40% are like the traditional jato. By contrast, 71% of our abbreviations are still of the traditional type like MVP, which emulate the patterns found in 150-year-old French and British dictionaries, which in turn emulate classical and medieval patterns.
REFERENCES
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