Acronym (Published 2010) (2024)

Mark Scheerer writes in response to my column on the 20th anniversary of the World Wide Web: "Tim Berners-Lee says his friends gave him a hard time because his term, World Wide Web, 'yielded an acronym that was nine syllables long when spoken.' I believe it actually yielded an abbreviation or a set of initials -- not an acronym, or letters which form a word."

Acronym is one of those words that has remained maddeningly ill-defined for its entire existence. Like my predecessor William Safire, I prefer defining acronym as “a pronounceable word created out of the initials or major parts of a compound term, like NATO, radar or TriBeCa.” When the abbreviation is pronounced by the names of initial letters, like C.I.A. (“see eye ay”), U.C.L.A. (“you see ell ay”) or the unwieldy WWW (“double-u double-u double-u”), then it’s best to call it an initialism. This is the nomenclature preferred by many abbreviation-watchers, including the creators of the “Acronyms, Initialisms and Abbreviations Dictionary,” first published in 1960.

Not everyone is on board with the acronym vs. initialism distinction, however. Another definition of acronym is more expansive, encompassing any abbreviation formed from initial letters regardless of pronunciation. Even language specialists occasionally prefer this watered-down version of acronym. For instance, Grover Hudson’s “Essential Introductory Linguistics” divides the broader category of “acronyms” into “word acronyms” (the kind pronounced as words, like radar), and “spelling acronyms” (another name for “initialisms” like WWW).

Though initialism is the older term, it has never caught on in wider usage, which is part of the problem in getting people to see eye to eye on the distinction between acronyms and initialisms. The earliest known use of initialism is from 1844, in an article in “The Christian’s Monthly Magazine and Universal Review” discussing SPQR, an abbreviation of the Latin phrase Senatus Populusque Romanus ("The Senate and People of Rome").

It took another century for acronym to make the scene in English, taking off during World War II (though the German equivalent, Akronym, had been in use since the early 1920s). Stephen Goranson, a researcher at Duke University, recently discovered a use of acronym from 1940, but even then it could be used in the broader meaning. In “Paris Gazette,” a novel by Lion Feuchtwanger, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir, a character discusses the abbreviation of “Paris German News” as P.G.N.: “Pee-gee-enn; what's the word for words like that, made out of initials? … It's an acronym, that's what it is. That's what they call words made up of initials. So I remember it after all; that's at least something.”

A few years later, in 1943, acronym started catching on in the more restricted sense for abbreviations pronounced as words, thanks to the proliferation of such contractions during the wartime effort. For instance, “absent without leave,” abbreviated as A.W.O.L., could be pronounced by its initial letters (“ay double-u oh ell”) or acronymically (“ay-wol”). Some words continue to go either way, such as F.A.Q. for “frequently asked questions,” sometimes pronounced as an initialism (“eff ay queue”) and sometimes as an acronym (“fack”).

Acronymy has ancient roots, as illustrated by the early Christian use of the Greek word ichthys meaning “fish” as an acronym for Iēsous Christos, Theou Huios, Sōtēr ("Jesus Christ, God's son, Savior"). In English, the first known acronyms (as opposed to plain old initialisms) cropped up in the telegraphic code developed by Walter P. Phillips for the United Press Association in 1879. The code abbreviated“Supreme Court of the United States” asSCOTUS and“President of the...” asPOT, giving way toPOTUS by 1895. Those shorthand labels have lingered in journalistic and diplomatic circles -- now joined by FLOTUS, which of course stands for “First Lady of the United States.”