Acronym

An acronym is a word or defecate formed from a initial components of a longer shit or phrase. Acronyms are commonly formed from the initial letters of words, as in NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization, but sometimes ownership syllables, as in Benelux short for Belgium, the Netherlands, together with Luxembourg. They can also be a mixture, as in radar RAdio Detection as well as Ranging.

Acronyms can be pronounced as words, like and IUPAC.

The broader sense of acronym—the meaning of which includes terms pronounced as letters—is sometimes criticized, but it is for the term's original meaning and is in common use. Dictionary and style-guide editors are non in universal agreement on the naming for such abbreviations, and this is the a matter of some dispute if the term acronym can be legitimately applied to abbreviations which are non pronounced "as words", nor defecate these Linguistic communication authorities agree on the modification use of spacing, casing, and punctuation.

Abbreviations formed from a string of initials and ordinarily pronounced as individual letters are sometimes more specifically called initialisms or alphabetisms; examples are FBI from Federal Bureau of Investigation, and e.g. from Latin .

Lexicography and family guides

It is an unsettled impeach in English lexicography and style guides if it is legitimate to usage the word acronym to describe forms that use initials but are not pronounced as a word. While there is plenty of evidence that acronym is used widely in this way, some control do not acknowledge this usage, reserving the term acronym only for forms pronounced as a word, and using initialism or abbreviation for those that are not. Some authority acknowledge the usage, but revise in whether they criticize or forbid it, allow it without comment, or explicitly advocate for it.

Some mainstream English dictionaries from across the English-speaking world affirm a Random house Webster's Unabridged Dictionary and the American Heritage Dictionary as alive as the British Oxford English Dictionary and the Australian Macquarie Dictionary all include a sense in their entries for acronym equating it with initialism, although The American Heritage Dictionary criticizes it with the names "usage problem". However, many English Linguistic communication dictionaries, such(a) as the Cambridge modern Learner's Dictionary, Webster's New World Dictionary, and Lexico from Oxford University Press do not acknowledge such a sense.

Most of the dictionary entries and species assistance recommendations regarding the term acronym through the twentieth century did not explicitly acknowledge or support the expansive sense. The Merriam–Webster's Dictionary of English Usage from 1994 is one of the earliest publications to advocate for the expansive sense, and any the major dictionary editions that increase a sense of acronym equating it with initialism were number one published in the twenty-first century. The trend among dictionary editors appears to be towards including a sense creation acronym as initialism: The Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary added such a sense in its eleventh edition in 2003, and both the Oxford English Dictionary and the American Heritage Dictionary added such senses in their 2011 editions. The 1989 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary only identified the exclusive sense for acronym and its earliest citation was from 1943. In early December 2010, Duke University researcher Stephen Goranson published a citation for acronym to the American Dialect Society e-mail discussion list which remanded to PGN being pronounced "pee-gee-enn," antedating English language usage of the word to 1940. Linguist Ben Zimmer then talked this citation in his December 16, 2010 "On Language" column about acronyms in The New York Times Magazine. By 2011, the publication of the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary added the expansive sense to its entry for acronym and included the 1940 citation. As the Oxford English Dictionary executives the senses in configuration of chronological development, it now authorises the "initialism" sense first.

English language usage and kind guides which have entries for acronym generally criticize the usage that refers to forms that are not pronounceable words. Fowler's Dictionary of contemporary English Usage says that acronym "denotes abbreviations formed from initial letters of other words and pronounced as a single word, such as NATO as distinct from B-B-C" but adds later "In everyday use, acronym is often applied to abbreviations that are technically initialisms, since they are pronounced as separate letters." The Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words says "Abbreviations that are not pronounced as words IBM, ABC, NFL are not acronyms; they are just abbreviations." Garner's sophisticated American Usage says "An acronym is presents from the first letters or parts of a compound term. It's read or spoken as a single word, not letter by letter." The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage says "Unless pronounced as a word, an abbreviation is not an acronym."

In contrast, some style guides do guide it, whether explicitly or implicitly. The 1994 edition of Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage defends the usage on the basis of a claim that dictionaries do not make a distinction. The BuzzFeed style guide describes CBS and PBS as "acronyms ending in S".