Acronyms and
initialisms are
abbreviations that are formed using the initial components in a phrase or name. These components may be individual letters (as in
CEO) or parts of words (as in
Benelux or
Delmarva). 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, acronyms and initialisms are viewed as a subtype of
blending.
While the word abbreviation refers to any shortened form of a word or a phrase, some have used initialism or alphabetism to refer to an abbreviation formed simply from, and used simply as, a string of initials. In 1943, Bell Laboratories coined the term acronym as the name for a word (such as sonar, originally SONAR) created from the first letters of each word in a series of words (such as sound navigation and ranging).[1] The terms initialism and alphabetism are neither widely used nor widely known. The term acronym is widely used to describe any abbreviation formed from initial letters.[2]
Most dictionaries define acronym to mean "a word" in its original sense, [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] while some include a secondary indication of usage, attributing to acronym the same meaning as that of initialism.[13][14][15] According to the primary definition found in most dictionaries, examples of acronyms would include NATO (pronounced /'ne?to?/), scuba (/'sku?b?/, self-contained underwater breathing apparatus), and radar (/'re?d?r/, radio detection and ranging), while examples of initialisms would include FBI (/??f?bi?'a?/) and HTML (/?e?t??ti???m'?l/).[9][14][16]
There is no agreement on what to call abbreviations whose pronunciation involves the combination of letter names and words, such as JPEG (/'d?e?p?g/) and MS-DOS (/??m?s'd?s/).
