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I've heard arguments on either side of the question of whether *abbreviation* is
correct when applied to the initial letters of some entity, such as FBI for
Federal Bureau of Investigation.
There's a thorough explanation of acronyms and their evolution in *The New
Fowler's Modern English Usage* (third edition). The explanation and history ends
with the note that "The limitations of the term being not widely known to the
general public, *acronym* is also often applied to abbreviations that are
familiar but are not pronounceable as words. Thus EC (European Community), FBI
(Federal Bureau of Investigation), and VCR (videocassette recorder). Such terms
are also called initialisms."
Fowler's, then, accepts any of the three terms--acronym, abbreviation, and
initialism--in reference to terms such as FBI.
Jo
--
Jo Baer
Senior Technical Writer
TCF National Bank
Minneapolis, Minnesota
jbaer -at- mailbox1 -dot- tcfbank -dot- com
If you can remain calm, you
just don't have all the facts.
Kelly Williamson wrote:
> > The style guide where I work specifies that an acronym must be
> > pronounceable, such as RADAR or SCUBA. Anything that can't be
> > pronounced as a word is just an abbreviation. I'd never heard this view
> > before, and it seems a little odd to me.
>
> You probably already heard this (sorry, I'm on digest), but just in case, I
> have also heard that an acronym must be pronounceable as a word. Otherwise,
> it is an "initialism" (not an abbreviation though--an abbreviation is just a
> shortened form of a word.)
>
> Haha! I just looked up "acronym" and "initialism" in Merriam-Webster online
> and it doesn't say anything about acronyms being pronounceable. Also, the
> definition it gives for initialism is "an acronym formed from initial
> letters"--haha!
>
> FWIW,
> Kelly
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