Originally Posted by
Shae
Nothing to do with the OP but it has come up a couple of times in this thread (and others). Those of us of an age were taught that an acronym is a "word" made up of the first letters of a multi word decription - such as "scuba", "radar", "awol", "NATO", etc. and pronounced as a word. However, over the years, the definition now also includes "abbreviations" that have become so commonly used that become their own "word" - such as "ATM", "HIV", "IRA", "IOU", "FBI", etc. Be safe out there and HYOH.
From Miriam Webster:
Acronym is a fairly recent word, dating from the 1940s, although acronyms existed long before we gave them that name. The term was preceded in English by the word
initialism, meaning an abbreviation formed from the initial letters of a phrase, and which has been in use since the late 19th century.
Some people feel strongly that
acronym should only be used for terms like
NATO, which is pronounced as a single word, and that
initialism should be used if the individual letters are all pronounced distinctly, as with
FBI. Our research shows that
acronym is commonly used to refer to both types of abbreviations.