Acronyms and initialisms are abbreviations An abbreviation is a shortened form of a word or phrase. Usually, but not always, it consists of a letter or group of letters taken from the word or phrase. For example, the word abbreviation can itself be represented by the abbreviation abbr., abbrv. or abbrev that are formed using the initial components in a phrase or name. These components may be individual letters (as in CEO A chief executive officer or chief executive is the highest-ranking corporate officer (executive) or administrator in charge of total management of an organization. An individual appointed as CEO of a corporation, company, organization, or agency reports to the board of directors) or parts of words (as in Benelux The Benelux is an economic union in Western Europe that comprises three neighbouring countries, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. These countries are located in northwestern Europe between France and Germany. The Union's name is formed from the beginning of each country's name; it was possibly created for the Benelux Customs Union,). 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 In linguistics, word formation is the creation of a new word. Word formation is sometimes contrasted with semantic change, which is a change in a single word's meaning. The line between word formation and semantic change is sometimes a bit blurry; what one person views as a new use of an old word, another person might view as a new word derived process, acronyms and initialisms are viewed as a subtype of blending In linguistics, a blend is a word formed from parts of two or more other words. These parts are sometimes, but not always, morphemes.
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Nomenclature
In 1943, David Davis of Bell Laboratories Bell Laboratories is the research and development organization of Alcatel-Lucent and previously of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T) coined the term acronym as the name for a word created from the first letters of each word in a series of words (such as sonar Sonar is a technique that uses sound propagation (usually underwater, as in Submarine navigation) to navigate, communicate with or detect other vessels. Two types of technology share the name "sonar": passive sonar is essentially listening for the sound made by vessels; active sonar is emitting pulses of sounds and listening for echoes, created from sound navigation and ranging).[1] While the word abbreviation An abbreviation is a shortened form of a word or phrase. Usually, but not always, it consists of a letter or group of letters taken from the word or phrase. For example, the word abbreviation can itself be represented by the abbreviation abbr., abbrv. or abbrev 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.
Although 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][13][14][15] while some include a secondary indication of usage, attributing to acronym the same meaning as that of initialism.[16][17][18] According to the primary definition found in most dictionaries, acronyms examples include, NATO The North Atlantic Treaty Organization or NATO (pronounced /ˈneɪtoʊ/ NAY-toe; French: Organisation du traité de l'Atlantique Nord ), also called the "(North) Atlantic Alliance", is an intergovernmental military alliance based on the North Atlantic Treaty which was signed on 4 April 1949. The NATO headquarters are in Brussels, Belgium, (pronounced /ˈneɪtoʊ/), scuba A scuba set is an independent breathing set that provides a scuba diver with the breathing gas necessary to breathe underwater during scuba diving. It is much used for sport diving and some sorts of work diving (/ˈskuːbə/), and radar Radar is an object-detection system that uses electromagnetic waves - specifically radio waves - to identify the range, altitude, direction, or speed of both moving and fixed objects such as aircraft, ships, spacecraft, mountain ranges, radio and TV towers, guided missiles, motor vehicles, weather formations, and terrain. The radar dish, or (/ˈreɪdɑr/), while examples of initialisms would include FBI The Federal Bureau of Investigation is an agency of the United States Department of Justice that serves as both a federal criminal investigative body and an internal intelligence agency. The FBI has investigative jurisdiction over violations of more than 200 categories of federal crime. Its motto is the backronym of FBI, "Fidelity, Bravery, (/ˌɛfˌbiːˈaɪ/) and HTML HTML, which stands for HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for web pages. It is written in the form of HTML elements consisting of "tags" surrounded by angle brackets within the web page content (/ˌeɪtʃˌtiːˌɛmˈɛl/).[12][17][19]
There is no agreement on what to call abbreviations whose pronunciation involves the combination of letter names and words, such as JPEG In computing, JPEG is a commonly used method of lossy compression for photographic images. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10:1 compression with little perceptible loss in image quality (/ˈdʒeɪpɛɡ/) and MS-DOS MS-DOS is an operating system for x86-based personal computers. It was the most commonly used member of the DOS family of operating systems, and was the main operating system for IBM PC compatible personal computers during the 1980s to the mid 1990s, until it was gradually superseded by operating systems offering a graphical user interface (GUI), (/ˌɛmɛsˈdɒs/).
There is also some disagreement as to what to call abbreviations that some speakers pronounce as letters and others pronounce as a word. For example, the terms URL In computing, a Uniform Resource Locator is a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) that specifies where an identified resource is available and the mechanism for retrieving it. In popular usage and in many technical documents and verbal discussions it is often incorrectly used as a synonym for URI,. The best-known example of a URL is the " and IRA An Individual Retirement Arrangement is a retirement plan account that provides some tax advantages for retirement savings in the United States can be pronounced as individual letters: /ˌjuːˌɑrˈɛl] and /ˌaɪˌɑrˈeɪ/ respectively; or as a single word: /ˈɜrl/ and /ˈaɪrə/ respectively. Such constructions, however—regardless of how they are pronounced—if formed from initials, may be identified as initialisms without controversy.
The term for the word-by-word reconstruction of an acronym or initialism is an expansion.
Sat, 07 Aug 2010 12:52:54 GMT+00:00
Auto Tech World (blog) from its Marathi initialism , is a Marathi newspaper based out of Mumbai, India. It is the 9th largest selling daily newspaper in the country. ...
