An acronym (pronounced AK-ruh-nihm, from Greek acro- in the sense of extreme or tip and

onyma or name) is an abbreviation of several words in such a way that the abbreviation itself
forms a pronounceable word. The word may already exist or it can be a new word. Webster's
cites snafu and radar, two terms of World War Two vintage, as examples of acronyms that were
created.
According to the strictest definition of an acronym, only abbreviations that are pronounced as
words qualify. So by these standards, for example, COBOL is an acronym because it's
pronounced as a word but WHO (World Health Organization) is not an acronym because the
letters in the abbreviation are pronounced individually. However, opinions differ on what
constitutes an acronym: Merriam-Webster, for example, says that an acronym is just "a word
formed from the initial letters of a multi-word name."
Frequently, acronyms are formed that use existing words (and sometimes the acronym is
invented first and the phrase name represented is designed to fit the acronym). Here are some
examples of acronyms that use existing words:
BASIC (Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code)
NOW (National Organization for Women)
OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards)
Abbreviations that use the first letter of each word in a phrase are sometimes referred to as
initialisms. Initialisms can be but are not always acronyms. AT&T, BT, CBS, CNN, IBM, and
NBC are initialisms that are not acronyms. Many acronym lists you'll see are really lists of
acronyms and initialisms or just lists of abbreviations. (Note that abbreviations include shortened
words like "esp." for "especially" as well as shortened phrases.)
Summing up:

An abbreviation is a shortening of a word or a phrase.

An acronym is an abbreviation that forms a word.

An initialism is an abbreviation that uses the first letter of each word in the phrase (thus,
some but not all initialisms are acronyms).

Furthermore:

An acronym so familiar that no one remembers what it stands for is called an anacronym
(For example, few people know that COBOL stands for Common Business Oriented
Language.)

An acronym in which one of the letters stands for the actual word abbreviated therein is
called a recursive acronym. (For example, VISA is said to stand for VISA International
Service Association.)

An acronym in which the short form was original and words made up to stand for it
afterwards is called a backronym. (For example, SOS was originally chosen as a distress
signal because it lent itself well to Morse code. Long versions, including Save Our Ship
and Save our Souls, came later.)

An acronym whose letters spell a word meaningful in the context of the term it stands for
is called an apronym. (For example, BASIC, which stands for Beginner's All-purpose
Symbolic Instruction Code, is a very simple programming language.)

Back formation

Back-derivation" redirects here. For derivation of a logical or mathematic expression, see

Derivation (logic). For other uses, see Onomasiology.
In etymology, back-formation is the process of creating a new lexeme, usually by removing
actual or supposed affixes.[1] The resulting neologism is called a back-formation, a term coined
by James Murray[2] in 1889. (OED online first definition of 'back formation' is from the
definition of to burgle, which was first published in 1889.)
Back-formation is different from clipping back-formation may change the part of speech or the
word's meaning, whereas clipping creates shortened words from longer words, but does not
change the part of speech or the meaning of the word.
For example, the noun resurrection was borrowed from Latin, and the verb resurrect was then
backformed hundreds of years later from it by removing the ion suffix. This segmentation of
resurrection into resurrect + ion was possible because English had examples of Latinate words in
the form of verb and verb+-ion pairs, such as opine/opinion. These became the pattern for many
more such pairs, where a verb derived from a Latin supine stem and a noun ending in ion entered
the language together, such as insert/insertion, project/projection, etc.
Back-formation may be similar to the reanalyses of folk etymologies when it rests on an
erroneous understanding of the morphology of the longer word. For example, the singular noun
asset is a back-formation from the plural assets. However, assets is originally not a plural; it is a
loanword from Anglo-Norman asetz (modern French assez). The -s was reanalyzed as a plural
suffix.

Back-formation may be particularly common in English since many English words are borrowed
from Latin, French and Greek, giving English a large range of common affixes. Many words
with affixes have entered English, such as dismantle and dishevelled, and it may therefore be
easy to believe that these are formed from roots such as mantle (meaning to put something
together) and shevelled (meaning well-dressed) when these words actually have no real history
of existing in English.
Even though many English words are formed this way, new coinages may sound strange, and are
often used for humorous effect. For example, gruntled (from disgruntled) would be considered a
barbarism, and used only in humorous contexts, such as by P. G. Wodehouse, who wrote "He
spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he
was far from being gruntled". The comedian George Gobel regularly used original backformations in his humorous monologues. Bill Bryson mused that the English language would be
richer if we could call a tidy-haired person shevelled as an opposite to dishevelled.[3] In the
American sitcom Scrubs, the character Turk once said when replying to Dr. Cox, "I don't disdain
you! It's quite the opposite I dain you."[4] As it happens, gruntle and dain are both attested
much earlier, but not as antonyms of the longer forms.[5]
Back-formations frequently begin in colloquial use and only gradually become accepted. For
example, enthuse (from enthusiasm) is gaining popularity, though it is still considered
substandard by some today.[who?]
The immense celebrations in Britain at the news of the relief of the Siege of Mafeking briefly
created the verb to maffick, meaning to celebrate both extravagantly and publicly. "Maffick" is a
back-formation from Mafeking, a place-name that was treated humorously as a gerund or
participle. There are many other examples of back-formations in the English language.

Abbreviation

An abbreviation (from Latin brevis, meaning short) is a shortened form of a word or phrase. It
consists of a group of letters taken from the word or phrase. For example, the word abbreviation
can itself be represented by the abbreviation abbr., abbrv. or abbrev.
In strict analysis, abbreviations should not be confused with contractions, acronyms, or
initialisms, with which they share some semantic and phonetic functions, though all four are
connoted by the term "abbreviation" in loose parlance.[1]:p167An abbreviation is a shortening by
any method; a contraction is a reduction of size by the drawing together of the parts. A
contraction of a word is made by omitting certain letters or syllables and bringing together the
first and last letters or elements; an abbreviation may be made by omitting certain portions from
the interior or by cutting off a part. A contraction is an abbreviation, but an abbreviation is not
necessarily a contraction. Acronyms and initialisms are regarded as subsets of abbreviations (e.g.

by the Council of Science Editors). They are abbreviations that consist of the initial letters or
parts of words.
Abbreviations have a long history, used so that spelling out a whole word could be avoided. This
might be done to save time and space, and also to provide secrecy. Shortened words were used
and initial letters were commonly used to represent words in specific applications. In classical
Greece and Rome, the reduction of words to single letters was common.[2] In Roman inscriptions,
"Words were commonly abbreviated by using the initial letter or letters of words, and most
inscriptions have at least one abbreviation." However, "some could have more than one meaning,
depending on their context. (For example, A can be an abbreviation for many words, such as
ager, amicus, annus, as, Aulus, Aurelius, aurum and avus.)"[3]
Abbreviations in English were frequently used from its earliest days. Manuscripts of copies of
the old English poem Beowulf used many abbreviations, for example 7 or & for and, and y for
since, so that "not much space is wasted".[4] The standardisation of English in the 15th through
17th centuries included such a growth in the use of abbreviations.[5][citation needed] At first,
abbreviations were sometimes represented with various suspension signs, not only periods. For
example, sequences like er were replaced with , as in mast for master and exacbate for
exacerbate. While this may seem trivial, it was symptomatic of an attempt by people manually
reproducing academic texts to reduce the copy time. An example from the Oxford University
Register, 1503:[citation needed]
Mast subwarden y mde me to you. And wher y wrot to you the last wyke that y trouyde itt
good to differr thelection ov to qudena tinitatis y have be thougt me syn that itt woll be
then a bowte mydsom.
The Early Modern English period, between the 15th and 17th centuries, had abbreviations like ye
for e, used for the word the: "hence, by later misunderstanding, Ye Olde Tea Shoppe."[6]
During the growth of philological linguistic theory in academic Britain, abbreviating became
very fashionable. The use of abbreviation for the names of J. R. R. Tolkien and his friend C. S.
Lewis, and other members of the Oxford literary group known as the Inklings, are sometimes
cited as symptomatic of this.[citation needed] Likewise, a century earlier in Boston, a fad of
abbreviation started that swept the United States, with the globally popular term OK generally
credited as a remnant of its influence.[7][8]
After World War II, the British greatly reduced the use of the full stop and other punctuation
points after abbreviations in at least semi-formal writing, while the Americans more readily kept
such use until more recently, and still maintain it more than Britons. The classic example,
considered by their American counterparts quite curious, was the maintenance of the internal
comma in a British organisation of secret agents called the "Special Operations,
Executive""S.O.,E"which is not found in histories written after about 1960.
But before that, many Britons were more scrupulous at maintaining the French form. In French,
the period only follows an abbreviation if the last letter in the abbreviation is not the last letter of
its antecedent: "M." is the abbreviation for "monsieur" while "Mme" is that for "madame". Like

many other cross-channel linguistic acquisitions, many Britons readily took this up and followed
this rule themselves, while the Americans took a simpler rule and applied it rigorously.[citation needed]
Over the years, however, the lack of convention in some style guides has made it difficult to
determine which two-word abbreviations should be abbreviated with periods and which should
not. The U.S. media tend to use periods in two-word abbreviations like United States (U.S.), but
not personal computer (PC) or television (TV). Many British publications have gradually done
away with the use of periods in abbreviations.
Minimization of punctuation in typewritten material became economically desirable in the 1960s
and 1970s for the many users of carbon-film ribbons since a period or comma consumed the
same length of non-reusable expensive ribbon as did a capital letter.
Widespread use of electronic communication through mobile phones and the Internet during the
1990s allowed for a marked rise in colloquial abbreviation. This was due largely to increasing
popularity of textual communication services such as instant- and text messaging. SMS, for
instance, supports message lengths of 160 characters at most (using the GSM 03.38 character
set). This brevity gave rise to an informal abbreviation scheme sometimes called Textese, with
which 10% or more of the words in a typical SMS message are abbreviated.[9] More recently
Twitter, a popular social networking service, began driving abbreviation use with 140 character
message limits.

Lowercase letters
f the original word was capitalized then the first letter of its abbreviation should retain the
capital, for example Lev. for Leviticus. When a word is abbreviated to more than a single letter
and was originally spelled with lower case letters then there is no need for capitalization.
However, when abbreviating a phrase where only the first letter of each word is taken, then all
letters should be capitalized, as in YTD for year-to-date, PCB for printed circuit board and FYI
for for your information. However, see the following section regarding abbreviations that have
become common vocabulary: these are no longer written with capital letters.

Blends
Blends abridge then combine lexemes to form a new word. Defining a true blend is complicated
by the difficulty of determining which parts of the new word are "recoverable" (have roots which
can be distinguished).[1]
Blends can be divided into three groups:[1]
1. Phonemic Overlap: a syllable or part of a syllable is shared between two words
2. Clipping: two words are shortened then compounded

3. Phonemic Overlap and Clipping: two words are shortened to a shared syllable and then
compounded
Formation

Most blends are formed by one of the following methods:

1. The beginning of one word is added to the end of the other (see
portmanteau). For example, brunch is a blend of breakfast and lunch.
o

simultaneous (5) + broadcast (2) simulcast (3, exception)

smoke (1) + fog (1) smog (1)

spoon (1) + fork (1) spork (1)

2. The beginnings of two words are combined. For example, cyborg is a blend of
cybernetic and organism.
3. Two words are blended around a common sequence of sounds. For example,
the word californication is a blend of California and fornication, and the
word motel is a blend of motor and hotel
4. Multiple sounds from two component words are blended, while mostly
preserving the sounds' order. Poet Lewis Carroll was well known for these
kinds of blends. An example of this is the word slithy, a blend of lithe and
slimy.

A blended word may undergo further modification in form or meaning over time, and the
meanings of its parts can become obsolete. Malinger may have developed from a blend in old
French of malade (ill), maigre (meager) and haingre (haggard).[2] When two words are combined
in their entirety, the result is considered a compound word rather than a blend. For example,
bagpipe is a compound, not a blend, of bag and pipe.
Blending of two roots

Blending can also apply to roots rather than words, for instance in Israeli Hebrew:

"Israeli dakhpr bulldozer hybridizes (Mishnaic Hebrew>>)Israeli

dp push and (Biblical Hebrew>>)Israeli pr dig[...]

Israeli shiltt zapping, surfing the channels, flipping through the

channels derives from
o

(i) (Hebrew>)Israeli shalt remote control, an ellipsis like English

remote (but using the noun instead) of the (widely known) compound
shalt rakhk cf. the Academy of the Hebrew Languages
shalt rkhak; and

(ii) (Hebrew>)Israeli shitt wandering, vagrancy. Israeli

shiltt was introduced by the Academy of the Hebrew Language in [...]
1996. Synchronically, it might appear to result from reduplication of
the final consonant of shalt remote control.

Another example of blending which has also been explained as mere

reduplication is Israeli gakhlilt fire-fly, glow-fly, Lampyris'. This
coinage by Hayyim Nahman Bialik blends (Hebrew>)Israeli gakhlet
burning coal with (Hebrew>)Israeli lyla night. Compare this with the
unblended khakhlilt (black) redstart, Phnicurus (<<Biblical Hebrew
dull red, reddish). Synchronically speaking though, most native Israelispeakers feel that gakhlilt includes a reduplication of the third radical of
gl. This is incidentally how Ernest Klein[3] explains gakhlilt. Since he is
attempting to provide etymology, his description might be misleading if one
agrees that Hayyim Nahman Bialik had blending in mind." [4]

"There are two possible etymological analyses for Israeli Hebrew kaspr bank clerk,
teller. The first is that it consists of (Hebrew>)Israeli ksef money and the
(International/Hebrew>)Israeli agentive suffix - -r. The second is that it is a quasi-portmanteau
word which blends ksef money and (Hebrew>)Israeli spr count. Israeli Hebrew
kaspr started as a brand name but soon entered the common language. Even if the second
analysis is the correct one, the final syllable - -r apparently facilitated nativization since it was
regarded as the Hebrew suffix - -r (probably of Persian pedigree), which usually refers to
craftsmen and professionals, for instance as in Mendele Mocher Sforims coinage
smartutr rag-dealer."[5]
Lexical selection
Main article: portmanteau

Blending may occur with an error in lexical selection, the process by which a speaker uses his
semantic knowledge to choose words. Lewis Carroll's explanation, which gave rise to the use of
'portmanteau' for such combinations, was:
Humpty Dumpty's theory, of two meanings packed into one word like a portmanteau, seems to
me the right explanation for all. For instance, take the two words "fuming" and "furious." Make
up your mind that you will say both words ... you will say "frumious."[6]
The errors are based on similarity of meanings, rather than phonological similarities, and the
morphemes or phonemes stay in the same position within the syllable

How to determine example from acronyms, back formation, abbreviation , clipping and blends
determine example from acronyms

Many words came into English by this route: Pease was once a mass noun but was reinterpreted
as a plural, leading to the back-formation pea. The noun statistic was likewise a back-formation
from the field of study statistics. In Britain, the verb burgle came into use in the 19th century as a
back-formation from burglar (which can be compared to the North American verb burglarize
formed by suffixation).
Other examples are

Adjective/Noun "couth" from "uncouth"

Noun "taxon", a unit of classification in taxonomy, derived from Greek taxis

(arrangement)+nomia "distribution"

Singular "sastruga", plural "sastrugi" (from Russian): new Latin-type singular "sastrugus"
has been used sometimes

Singular "syringe", from plural "syringes"; the original Greek singular is syrinx

Singular tamale, from the plural tamales; the original Spanish singular is tamal.

Verb "edit" from "editor"

Verbs "euthanase" or "euthanize" from the noun "euthanasia".

determine example from abbreviation

Periods (full stops) and spaces

A period (full stop) is often used to signify an abbreviation, but opinion is divided as to when and
if this should happen.
According to Hart's Rules, the traditional rule is that abbreviations (in the narrow sense that
includes only words with the ending, and not the middle, dropped) terminate with a full stop,
whereas contractions (in the sense of words missing a middle part) do not, but there are
exceptions.[1]:p167170 Fowler's Modern English Usage says full stops are used to mark both
abbreviations and contractions, but recommends against this practice: advising them only for
abbreviations and lower-case initialisms and not for upper-case initialisms and contractions.[10]
Example

Category

Short form

Source

Doctor

Contraction

Dr

Dr

Professor

Abbreviation

Prof.

Prof...

The Reverend

Abbreviation

Rev.

Rev...

The Reverend

Contraction

Revd

Revd

The Right Honourable

Contraction and Abbreviation

Rt Hon.

Rt Hon...

In American English, the period is usually included. In some cases periods are optional, as in
either US or U.S. for United States, EU or E.U. for European Union, and UN or U.N. for United
Nations. There are some house styles, howeverAmerican ones includedthat remove the
periods from almost all abbreviations. For example:

The U.S. Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices advises that periods
should not be used with abbreviations on road signs, except for cardinal
directions as part of a destination name. (For example, "Northwest Blvd", "W.
Jefferson", and "PED XING" all follow this recommendation.)

AMA style, used in many medical journals, uses no periods in abbreviations or

acronyms, with almost no exceptions. Thus eg, ie, vs, et al, Dr, Mr, MRI, ICU,
and hundreds of others contain no periods. The only exceptions are "No." (to
avoid the appearance of "No"); initials within persons' names (such as
"George R. Smith"); and "St." within persons' names when the person prefers
it (such as "Emily R. St. Clair") (but not in city names such as St Louis or St
Paul). (AMA style also forgoes italic on terms long since naturalized into
English from Latin, New Latin, other languages, or ISV; thus, no italic for eg,
ie, vs, et al, in vivo, in vitro, or in situ.)

Acronyms that were originally capitalized (with or without periods) but have since entered the
vocabulary as generic words are no longer written with capital letters nor with any periods.
Examples are sonar, radar, lidar, laser, snafu, and scuba.
Today, spaces are generally not used between single-letter abbreviations of words in the same
phrase, so one almost never encounters "U. S."
When an abbreviation appears at the end of a sentence, only one period is used: The capital of
the United States is Washington, D.C.
Plural forms

There is a question about how to pluralize abbreviations, particularly acronyms. Often a writer
will add an 's' following an apostrophe, as in "PC's". However, this style is not preferred by many
style guides. For instance, Kate Turabian, writing about style in academic writings,[11] allows for
an apostrophe to form plural acronyms "only when an abbreviation contains internal periods or
both capital and lowercase letters". Turabian would therefore prefer "DVDs" and "URLs" and
"Ph.D.'s", while the Modern Language Association[12] explicitly says, "do not use an apostrophe
to form the plural of an abbreviation". Also, the American Psychological Association specifically
says,[13][14] "without an apostrophe".
However, the 1999 style guide for the New York Times states that the addition of an apostrophe
is necessary when pluralizing all abbreviations, preferring "PC's, TV's and VCR's".[15]
Following those who would generally omit the apostrophe, to form the plural of Runs Batted In,
simply add an s to the end of RBI.[16]

RBIs

For all other rules, see below:

To form the plural of an abbreviation, a number, or a capital letter used as a noun, simply add a
lowercase s to the end. Apostrophes following decades and single letters are also common.

A group of MPs

The roaring 20s

Mind your Ps and Qs

To indicate the plural of the abbreviation or symbol of a unit of measure, the same form is used
as in the singular.

1 lb or 20 lb

1 ft or 16 ft

1 min or 45 min

When an abbreviation contains more than one full point, Hart's Rules recommends putting the s
after the final one.

Ph.D.s

M.Phil.s

the d.t.s

However, subject to any house style or consistency requirement, the same plurals may be
rendered less formally as:

PhDs

MPhils

the DTs. (This is the recommended form in the New Oxford Dictionary for
Writers and Editors.)

According to Hart's Rules, an apostrophe may be used in rare cases where clarity calls for it, for
example when letters or symbols are referred to as objects.

The x's of the equation

Dot the i's and cross the t's

However, the apostrophe can be dispensed with if the items are set in italics or quotes:

The xs of the equation

Dot the 'i's and cross the 't's

In Latin, and continuing to the derivative forms in European languages as well as English,
single-letter abbreviations had the plural being a doubling of the letter for note-taking. Most of
these deal with writing and publishing. A few longer abbreviations use this as well.
Singular
abbreviation

Singular Word

Plural
abbreviation

Plural Word

Disciplin
e

d.

didot

dd.

didots

typograph
y

f.

following line or
page

ff.

following lines or
pages

notes

F.

folio

Ff.

folios

literature

h.

hand

hh.

hands

horse
height

l.

line

ll.

lines

notes

MS

manuscript

MSS

manuscripts

notes

op.

opus

opp.

opera

notes

p.

page

pp.

pages

notes

Q.

quarto

Qq.

quartos

literature

s. (or )

section

ss. (or )

sections

notes

v.
volume
vv.
volumes
Conventions followed by publications and newspapers

notes

United States

Publications based in the U.S. tend to follow the style guides of The Chicago Manual of Style
and the Associated Press.[verification needed] The U.S. Government follows a style guide published by
the U.S. Government Printing Office. The National Institute of Standards and Technology sets
the style for abbreviations of units.
United Kingdom

Many British publications follow some of these guidelines in abbreviation:

For the sake of convenience, many British publications, including the BBC and
The Guardian, have completely done away with the use of full stops or
periods in all abbreviations. These include:
o

Social titles, like Ms or Mr (though these would usually not have had
full stopssee above) Capt, Prof, etc.;

Two-letter abbreviations for countries ("US", not "U.S.");

Abbreviations beyond three letters (full caps for all except

initialisms[clarification needed]);

Words seldom abbreviated with lower case letters ("PR", instead of

"p.r.", or "pr")

Names ("FW de Klerk", "GB Whiteley", "Park JS"). A notable exception is

The Economist which writes "Mr F. W. de Klerk".

Scientific units (see Measurement below).

Acronyms are often referred to with only the first letter of the abbreviation
capitalized. For instance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation can be
abbreviated as "Nato" or "NATO", and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome as
"Sars" or "SARS" (compare with "laser" which has made the full transition to
an English word and is rarely capitalised at all).

Initialisms are always written in capitals; for example the "British

Broadcasting Corporation" is abbreviated to "BBC", never "Bbc". An initialism
is similar to acronym but is not pronounced as a word.

When abbreviating scientific units, no space is added between the number

and unit (100mph, 100m, 10cm, 10C). (This is contrary to the SI standard;
see below.)

Miscellaneous and general rules

A doubled letter appears in abbreviations of some Welsh names, as in Welsh

the double "l" is a separate sound: "Ll. George" for (British prime minister)
David Lloyd George.

Some titles, such as "Reverend" and "Honourable", are spelt out when
preceded by "the", rather than as "Rev." or "Hon." respectively. This is true for
most British publications, and some in the United States.

A repeatedly used abbreviation should be spelt out for identification on its

first occurrence in a written or spoken passage. [17] Abbreviations likely to be
unfamiliar to many readers should be avoided.

Klein, Ernest (1987). A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language.

Jerusalem: CartaCarroll, Lewis (2009). Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the
Looking-Glass. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Fromkin, V., Rodman, R., & Hyams, N. (2011). An Introduction to Language (9th ed.). Boston,
USA: Cengage LearningRenner, Vincent, Franois Maniez & Pierre Arnaud (eds), 2012. Crossdisciplinary perspectives on lexical blending. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.