Acronyms

Acronyms are single, pronounceable words formed from the initial letters of a group of words. Anyone who has ever tried to look up an acronym online will know just how many of them there are floating around out there, and how many projects owe their names to their forming a neat acronym. The vast majority of acronyms have been coined since 1900, although one that dates from 1894 and is still in regular use is the military crime of being AWOL (‘absent without official leave’). Also military is Anzac [1915] for ‘Australian and New Zealand Army Corps’. Less conventionally military are fubar (in polite usage, ‘fouled up beyond all recognition’) and snafu (‘situation normal: all fouled up’), both from the Second World War. In the field of politics it is easy to forget that Pakistan [1933] is formed from the initials of Punjab, Afghani border, Kashmir, Sindh, and the ending of Baluchistan—the chief areas Muslims lived in under the British Raj. Also political was the Russian gulag [M20th] formed from the initial letters of the Russian for ‘Chief Administration for Corrective Labour Camps’. POTUS (‘President of the United States’) is another term that dates from the end of the 19th century, but the First Lady or FLOTUS does not appear until 1980. Members of quangos [1973] or ‘quasi-autonomous national or non-governmental organization’ are usually political appointees, while local politics gives us the Nimby (‘not in my back yard’) from 1970.

 Science is full of acronyms, including for atomic particles such as the WIMP or ‘weakly interacting massive particle’ [1985]. It also gives us radar (‘radio detection and ranging’) of 1940, and the related sonar (‘sound navigation and ranging’) of 1943; the laser (‘light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation’) of 1960 and the launching in 2020 of the JUICE (‘Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer’) mission. Science fiction gives us Doctor Who’s TARDIS [1969] (‘Time and Relative Dimensions in Space’) for something larger than it at first appears to be.

 At the supermarket since the 1980s you can find BOGOF (‘buy one, get one free’) and in North America buy canola oil (UK rapeseed oil) used as a generic but actually a proprietary name for ‘Canadian oil, low acid’ [1979]. For entertainment you could try BASE jumping (‘Building, Antenna-tower, Span, Earth’), a sport invented in the USA in the 1970s, or since the 1990s LARP (live-action role-playing), but best to avoid becoming the sort of cyclist called a Mamil (‘middle-aged man in Lycra’). The less energetic might go shopping, in which case you might need your PIN (‘personal identification number’), or online respond to a captcha (‘completely automatic public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart’) from 2001 or text YOLO [1968] ‘You only live once’ to a friend. The important thing is to avoid FOMO—‘fear of missing out’.

 Two words that are often described as acronyms but are definitely not are *posh and wiki (see oceanian words), which is sometimes explained as ‘what I know is …’ in what has been called a backronym, or backformation.

 See also moped.