Acronyms, Initialisms, and Abbreviations

The English Connection September 2005 Volume 9, Issue 3 Acronyms, Initialisms, and Abbreviations P eople have a penchant for taking the easy way out. This is true of using language as much as of anything else. It has formally been set out in linguistics as the principle of efficiency: The referring expression used must not contain more information than is necessary for the task at hand (Dale, 1989). This, of course, gives us shortened utterances and pronouns of all kinds, but it also gives us abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms. We all know what an abbreviation is - a word shortened by removing some of the letters but still pronounced as the original word, and having a period at the end (except in British English style where even the periods are often omitted), e.g., Apt. for apartment, Co. for company, and Mtns. for mountains. And we all know that a contraction is different from an abbreviation in that a contraction is a word that is formed by combining two words to reflect their contracted pronunciation as one word, often written with an apostrophe to indicate missing letters, e.g., don’t from do not, we’ll from we will, and let’s from let us. But how do acronyms and initialisms differ from abbreviations, and how do they differ from each other? Acronyms and initialisms are both special categories of abbreviations, not of single words but of groups of words, often denoting a proper noun or a commonly used phrase. Initialisms combine the first letter of each of the words, or each of the important words, of an expression, and each of the letters is pronounced individually. An example of an ELT-related initialism is ELT (pronounced E-L-T) which stands for English Language Teaching. Others are TPR (Total Physical Response), SLA (Second Language Acquisition), ESL and EFL (English as a Second/Foreign Language). Acronyms are also specialized abbreviations, but unlike initialisms, they are pronounced like a word. Accordingly, TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) is an acronym because it is pronounced as a two-syllable word (i.e., “tee-sol”). Such an acronym is called a letter acronym because it is made up of the initial letters of words in the expression. Other ELT-related letter acronyms include TESL and TEFL (Teaching English as a Second/Foreign Language), TOEFL and TOEIC, CALL (Computer-Assisted Language Learning), NEST (Native English-Speaking Teacher), and CELTA (Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults). Within our own organization you can join a SIG (Special Interest Group) and read TEC (The English Connection). Another type of acronym is the syllable acronym, composed of the initial syllables of words in an expression. Within Korea TESOL, a number of these 36 are used. They include ConComm (Conference Committee), TechComm (Technologies Committee), and DataMan (Database Manager). Still another type of acronym is a combination of the above two types, a letter-syllable combo acronym. The quickest example to come to mind is, of course, the acronym for our By David E. Shaffer organization: K O T E S O L (KOrea Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages). Word Whys Several additional combinations exist to make the world of acronyms even more interesting. We can find acronym-initialism duals , those abbreviations sometimes pronounced as acronyms and sometimes pronounced as initialisms, e.g., FAQ (F-A-Q or “fack”) and asap (A-S-A-P or ay-sap). And there are acronyminitialism combos, abbreviations that are a mixtures of acronyms and initialisms, e.g., JPEG (JAY-peg) and many of our SIGs: R-SIG (R-sig), YL-SIG (Y-L-sig), GISIG, and CT-SIG. [R, YL, GI, and CT stand for Research, Young Learners, Global Issues, and Christian Teachers, respectively.] Some abbreviations start out their lives as acronyms and undergo assimilation into common nouns, among them, nouns as common as: scuba (Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus) and laser (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation). The English world is full of acronyms and initialisms, often less technically lumped together and all referred to as acronyms. You can find manymore ELT-related ones at: http://iteslj.org/acronyms.html. A list of more than a thousand of the most commonly used acronyms can be found at: http://www.astro.umd.edu/ ~marshall/abbrev.html. If this is not enough for you, you can go to Acronyma, http://www.acronyma.com/, which bills itself as “the largest database of acronyms and abbreviations on the web” and includes a database of 438,149 English entries. Or try out the AcronymFinder, http://www.acronyma.com/, which searches over 2,427,000 acronyms and abbreviations. You may need it to decipher this closing initialism: TAFN. BBS. Reference Dale, R. (1989). Cooking up referring expressions. Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics, 68-75.