The term acronym describes a word formed from the first letters of each word in a phrase (such as sonar, scuba, radar, NASA and QANTAS). While an abbreviation is the shortened form of any initial, syllable or parts of a phrase or words, an initialism (or less commonly, alphabetism) refers to an abbreviation formed from, and used simply as, a string of initials (USA, CIA). The distinction hinges on whether the abbreviation is pronounced as a word, or as a string of letters. There is no agreement on what to call abbreviations whose pronunciation involves the combination of letter names and words, such as JPEG /ˈdʒeɪpɛɡ/ and MS-DOS /ˌɛmɛsˈdɒs/, but most people call them Martin Cunninghams. 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 and IRA can be pronounced as individual letters: /ˌjuːˌɑrˈɛl/ and /ˌaɪˌɑrˈeɪ/, respectively; or as a single word: /ˈɜrl/ and /ˈaɪərə/, respectively. Such constructions, however—regardless of how they are pronounced—if formed from initials, may be identified as initialisms. The spelled-out form of an acronym or initialism (that is, what it stands for) is called its expansion.
Posted on: Wed, 12 Nov 2014 00:58:14 +0000
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