Acronyms - Microsoft Style Guide (2024)

FAQs

Acronyms - Microsoft Style Guide? ›

If you have to use an acronym, also spell out the term for clarity. In general, include the acronym in parentheses following the spelled-out term.

Spell out most acronyms on first use

If there's a chance users won't know the meaning of an acronym or initialism, define it at first mention. Write the term in full first and follow with the acronym or initialism in parentheses. Use the shortened form rather than the full term for later mentions.

Use the Acronyms pane in Word

To see a list of defined acronyms, Go to References > Acronyms. In the Acronyms pane, find the acronyms from your document with their definitions. To see where the acronym definition was found, select Found in a shared file, Found in your email, or Defined by your organization .

Spell out the full term at its first mention, indicate its abbreviation in parenthesis and use the abbreviation from then on, with the exception of acronyms that would be familiar to most readers, such as MCC and USAID.

If an acronym must be used, spell out the full name on first reference and introduce the acronym using parentheses: Association of Residence Halls (ARH). The acronym may then be used in subsequent references.

Spell out on first mention. On subsequent mentions, use generic terms such as the board, the division, etc. Don't put acronyms in parentheses after the first reference (for example, “The Water Quality Control Division (WQCD) …”).

Always write out the first in-text reference to an acronym, followed by the acronym itself written in capital letters and enclosed by parentheses. Subsequent references to the acronym can be made just by the capital letters alone. For example: Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is a rapidly expanding field.

The first time the work is cited, you provide the full name of the organization followed by the standard acronym in brackets (narrative citation) or square brackets (parenthetical citation). The next time you cite from the same source, you may use only the acronym.

When you use an apostrophe to show ownership of something, you need to know how many items there are. When an item belongs to one item/acronym (singular), you add an apostrophe and an 's' to the acronym. For example: The TES's story about the UFOs was interesting.

A list of abbreviations is a list of all the abbreviations that you used in your thesis or dissertation. It should appear at the beginning of your document, with items in alphabetical order, just after your table of contents.

How do you create an acronym for a word? ›

We use the first letter of each word to create the acronym. Acronyms are said as a whole word. For example, we have the acronym “NASA,” which stands for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong was the first person to step on the moon.

An abbreviation is a truncated word; an acronym is made up of parts of the phrase it stands for and is pronounced as a word (ELISA, AIDS, GABA); an initialism is an acronym that is pronounced as individual letters (DNA, RT-PCR). For the purposes of this section, “abbreviation” will refer to all of these.

When citing the works of an organization, company or authority with a lengthy name, you may want to use an acronym. The first time the work is cited, you provide the full name of the organization followed by the standard acronym in brackets (narrative citation) or square brackets (parenthetical citation).

When you use acronyms in your MLA format paper, write them out in full first. Then, you can put the acronym in parentheses. You may then use the acronym throughout the rest of your paper. However, if it's a commonly known acronym, like FBI, CIA or IRS, you do not need to spell it out first.