Do you know what abbreviations, initialisms and acronyms are?
While you may not know those words specifically, you come across them with words such as Labs, footy, BC or JAXA.
An abbreviation is any word or phrase that is shorted: Lab instead of Labrador Retriever, footy for football/soccer, BC for Before Christ and JAXA for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.
Initialisms are abbreviations that take the first letter of two or more consecutive words and then say them as letters. Initialisms are prevalent in English and provide a useful way to take something long and make it short.
You can find these all throughout government agencies such as the NHS (National Health Service) in the UK, media, CNN (Cable News Network) in the USA, universities, UNSW Sydney (University of New South Wales Sydney) in Australia, and many more contexts.
Initialisms are also used with names such as JFK for the 35th president of the USA, John Fitzgerald Kennedy and MJ for basketball great Michael Jordan. While these are well known name initialisms, it is common for everyday people in the USA use their own initials on documents when a full signature is not required.
Acronyms are also abbreviations and are formed when the first letters of words in a sequence are used and are said as a word not as letters as with initialisms. Some well-known acronyms are NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), PIN (Personal Identification Number) and Wi-Fi (Wireless Fidelity). On the other hand, there are some common words that many people don’t know are acronyms. A couple examples are scuba (Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus) and laser (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation).
Have you ever taken an existing word and turned it into an acronym? If so, that is called a backronym. An example is SOS where Save Our Ship/Souls was added later. Backronyms can be useful to help expand one’s understanding of something such as grace in the Bible having the backronym of God’s Riches at Christ’s Expense.
Have fun expanding your understanding of English with the various ways that words and phrases are turned into abbreviations.
Erik