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What is your least favourite acronym? (lemmy.nz)

submitted 8 months ago by thatsTheCatch@lemmy.nz to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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Mine is OOO for Out Of Office. I always misread it in my head like a ghost and it takes me a few seconds to process. It also doesn't translate to speech—you have to say the whole thing.

Interested to see if others have similar acronyms they beef with.

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[–] wandermind@sopuli.xyz 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Sometimes, initialism or alphabetism is used to refer to acronyms formed from the string of initials which are usually pronounced as individual letters

[–] aulin@lemmy.world 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Hmm, okay, it's apparently debated. However, the only way I've learned it is that initialisms are words formed from initial letters of included words, and acronyms are initialisms pronounced as words. It seems like it varies by country as well.

[–] CallumWells@lemmy.ml 2 points 8 months ago

I think it makes logical sense that acronyms are initialisms, since initialism just implies that it's formed from the initials, thus all abbreviations formed from the initials of the words are initialisms, while a subset of those can be pronounced as a word and thus can be called acronyms. Personally I think it's very important that things are named such that one can logically deduce their origin and meaning.