When is an abbreviation an acronym, and when is an acronym also an initialism? This episode is all about abbreviations.
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Transcript
Emily Brewster:
Coming up on Word Matters, all about abbreviations. I'm Emily Brewster, and Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media. On each episode, Merriam-Webster editors Ammon Shea, Peter Sokolowski, and I explore some aspect of the English language from the dictionary's vantage point.
Among the different variety of lexical items in the English language, we have a category called abbreviations. And abbreviations are kind of word wannabes. They are not words. They are a shortened version of a word. We shorten it for convenience or for fun. Among abbreviations, there's the kind where just random letters get taken out, or not so random, really, like the word a-p-t for "apartment" or a-p-p-t for "appointment." Sometimes they have a period after them, sometimes they do not. And then we also have acronyms and initialisms.
Peter Sokolowski:
Uh-huh (affirmative).
Emily Brewster:
Acronym is the broader category. An acronym is an abbreviation that is made of the first letter or letters of a series of words. So for example, radar comes from "radio detection and ranging."
Peter Sokolowski:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Emily Brewster:
And the r-a of radar at the beginning is from the first two letters of radio. That's why an acronym is not from specifically the first letter of a set of words. Scuba is "self-contained underwater breathing apparatus." And we have something like D-I-Y, meaning "do it yourself," and A-S-A-P, "as soon as possible," as acronyms, except some people would get really upset if we said that D-I-Y and A-S-A-P are acronyms.
Peter Sokolowski:
Because we don't pronounce them as their-
Ammon Shea:
Because it's pronounced as "A-S-A-P."
Emily Brewster:
You are both correct. For some people, there is a really hard line between an acronym that can be pronounced as a word and an acronym that is identified by its letters. So A-S-A-P, we don't say A-sap, although I have said A-sap, actually.
Peter Sokolowski:
Some people do.
Emily Brewster:
If you say A-sap, then it just magically becomes an acronym. But if you say A-S-A-P, it is very specifically an initialism.
Ammon Shea:
Of course, though, we do define acronym as an initialism as well.
Emily Brewster:
Yes we do.
Ammon Shea:
So we kind of say ASAP could be called an initialism and it could be called an acronym. And we say this not because we're making a judgment call. We say this because this is how people use the word acronym. Sometimes they use it to refer to A-S-A-P, and sometimes they use it to refer to A-sap. And you can certainly distinguish between these two, and the world will not think poorly of you for distinguishing between these two, but people might get a little annoyed if you're the person at the party who has to stop the conversation to say, "Well, actually that's an initialism." Nobody really cares that much.
Emily Brewster:
And you definitely do not want to be the person who decides to die on the hill of scuba being an initialism because that's just totally not even true. So you do want to know them well enough to know that initialism just means you say the initials, I guess.
Ammon Shea:
Right.
Peter Sokolowski:
We do give A-sap as a variant, phonetic field for A-S-A-P. So we give it A-S-A-P and comma A-sap. We actually do give that information, so that's an interesting one.
Emily Brewster:
Actually, if you want cocktail party fodder about acronyms and initialisms, A-sap, A-S-A-P, is your word to bring.
Peter Sokolowski:
Absolutely.
Emily Brewster:
I think it's interesting that the most famous word in the English language, as in the word that is most widely used outside of English-speaking regions, is also an initialism, AKA an acronym. And that is the word OK. It-
Peter Sokolowski:
All correct.
Emily Brewster:
All correct. Yes. Peter, wait a minute. All correct? OK? Explain.
Peter Sokolowski:
Ammon might know the story better, but apparently there was a trend of humorous misspellings in journalism in the 19th century, and all correct spelled with an O and a K was frequent enough. And obviously, what it conveyed was an intent to be humorous, that that lighthearted use was abbreviated as OK. It's really a remarkable success, isn't it? As you say, the most popular word in the English language.
Emily Brewster:
Yeah, it's a good story. 1839-
Peter Sokolowski:
Yeah.
Emily Brewster:
... for the adverb or adjective use of OK. I really like the word OK also as an example of playfulness to remind people that other playful abbreviations like T-M-I and B-R-B, there's a long tradition of playful acronyms in the English language way, way back to 1839 and I'm sure longer ago than that also.
Peter Sokolowski:
There's another famous abbreviation with a dictionary connection, famous in a particular addition of a Merriam-Webster dictionary. It's the word dord, right?
Emily Brewster:
Dord.
Peter Sokolowski:
Because it was in fact an abbreviation, that is to say, this so-called ghost word that was originally to be entered in the abbreviation addenda, by the way, because in Webster's Second, the 1934 unabridged edition, the abbreviations were collected at the back of the book. And it was spelled capital D or lowercase d as the chemical abbreviation for the word density. And the D and the o-r and the other d were smushed together. And rather than appearing in the abbreviation addenda, it appeared in the body of the dictionary under its spelling D-O-R-D and is widely regarded as maybe the most famous error in a dictionary. It's certainly the most famous error in a Merriam-Webster dictionary for a so-called ghost word, a word that was entered with a definition. So it said dord, noun, "density." And of course, it didn't exist. It was not a real word, and it was subsequently removed. A very famous example of an abbreviation in a dictionary.
Emily Brewster:
Right, but capital D and lowercase d are still used as abbreviations for the word density.
Peter Sokolowski:
It's just that you should look for them in the abbreviations section, not in the general section of the vocabulary. Which reminds me of something else, which is that during our time at Merriam-Webster, the abbreviations addenda at the back of the Collegiate Dictionary was actually folded into what we call the "A to Z," the body of the dictionary itself, so that abbreviations could be much more easily found in an alphabetical order with the general vocabulary. So CIA, for example, would fall into the Cs of the dictionary and not stuck in the purgatory of the back of the book.
Emily Brewster:
We made that change because what dictionary consultant is going to think CIA is not going to be in the regular part of the dictionary? It's going to be in a special section on the back?
Ammon Shea:
And I just want to interject. I really like your use of the word consultant to mean "one who consults," not "somebody who consults," like a business consultant. I like that. I'm going to start using that.
Emily Brewster:
I think that is a very particular Merriam-Webster use of the word consultant. One who consults the dictionary, a reader, a user.
Ammon Shea:
Right, right. Consultant has just the right ring. That's a good word.
Emily Brewster:
Yeah. But TL;DR, I'm going to get us back to acronyms. TL;DR, that one entered our dictionary not very long ago. And it's an unusual abbreviation in that it has punctuation inside.
Ammon Shea:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Emily Brewster:
It is TL semicolon DR. And it means "too long; didn't read." It is often a commentary on something that you're referring to that is too long for you to have read. You're going to summarize it for your reader, or you're going to say, "I'm referring to this thing that I have not read because it is too long."
You are listening to Word Matters. I'm Emily Brewster. BRB with more on abbreviations.
Peter Sokolowski:
Word Matters listeners get 25% off all dictionaries and books at shop.merriam-webster.com by using the promo "matters" at checkout. That's "matters," M-A-T-T-E-R-S, at shop.merriam-webster.com.
Ammon Shea:
I'm Ammon Shea. Do you have a question about the origin history or meaning of a word? Email us at wordmatters@m-w.com.
Peter Sokolowski:
I'm Peter Sokolowski. Join me every day for the Word of the Day, a brief look at the history and definition of one word, available at merriam-webster.com or wherever you get your podcasts. And for more podcasts from New England Public Media, visit the NEPM podcast hub at nepm.org.
Emily Brewster:
It seems like new abbreviations sprout up daily. So what's a dictionary to do?
This heyday of abbreviations, though, is problematic for us as lexicographers. TL;DR met our criteria for entry because we had encountered it in enough published edited text that it met our criteria for entry, just like any other word does. And this is what we require of all abbreviations before we will consider them for entry.
TMI also met our criteria. We had evidence of it in published edited text of various kinds, formal, informal, but it wasn't that it was just relegated to text messages or to Twitter. If something only exists on Twitter, we don't enter it. It does not meet our qualifications. Doesn't meet our criteria, but these other words did. But we are all encountering texting abbreviations out in the world and not so much in published edited text.
Ammon Shea:
Well, there are also these great gaps on occasion, and perhaps one of the best known ones, at least in lexicographic circles, was OMG. And there was a wonderful, wonderful citation that the Oxford English Dictionary found, which was from John Arbuthnot Fisher, I believe, who was the Lord of the Admiralty. He was a British Admiral, and he wrote a letter in 1917—and I'm pretty sure the letter was written to Churchill—in which he writes, "I hear that a new order of knighthood is on the tapis. OMG." And then in parens, he very helpfully writes "Oh! My God!" end of parens. It's a clear case of OMG, although there's some speculation he may have been making punning reference to the Order of St. Michael and St. George. But it's OMG in clear text, though it's epistolary in nature. It's a handwritten letter.
But then it doesn't show up again until 1994. So you can argue that this is still obviously early lexical evidence, but it's not a sign that it was in common use for the next 70-odd years. It's a great citation, but it's also sign that things come and go. And it's a good reminder as well which has been raised before that there are a number of abbreviations which can occasionally be much older than we think.
And David Crystal had a whole book on this called Txtng: The gr8 db8 in which great, of course, is spelled "gr8." Debate is similarly truncated. This is a number of years ago, about the early profusion of words coming out of texting and how many of them in fact had been around for decades, if not hundreds of years already. But a lot of them are hidden. They're not in the type of sources that we generally look to.
Emily Brewster:
That's very interesting. I was looking at Gretchen McCulloch's Because Internet and in this book, one of the things that she talks about is the slangy internet abbreviations. And she says that the first slangy internet abbreviations that are so familiar to us can be traced specifically to around 1977 in a particular document.
So there's a document that programmers in the late 1970 used to chronicle their own jargon. They were writing to one another and they were using this jargon, and this document that they were keeping came to be known as the Jargon File. And it was published in 1983 as a print book called The Hacker's Dictionary.
But the Jargon File was this electronic index, and older versions of it would get overwritten by new versions, which was a shame because you would just get rid of the old version when the old version is a very rich source for understanding when something developed. But in 2018, they recovered an archive of backup tapes going back to 1976, and the oldest of these backup texts was a plain text file from August 12th of 1976 and it has none of the abbreviations that we think of. Absolutely none of them. But in 1977, they start appearing, including BTW and FYI. Also CUL for "see you later" and BCNU for "be seeing you." It's interesting to me that these programmers, there is a before and after, and it was 1976 and 1977.
Peter Sokolowski:
Wow. FYI is that recent.
Emily Brewster:
Yes. It's that recent in this particular document.
Peter Sokolowski:
We date FYI to 1986, so well after that, even. I have to say, I'm surprised. For some reason, that one felt more embedded into the language.
Emily Brewster:
It's also interesting to me that our date is so much later than this. That clearly needs to be revised, but that's one of the challenges. As we were just talking about, we enter abbreviations when we have substantial evidence of them in published edited texts from over an extended period of time, and that is what we look at primarily when we are deciding whether or not something is ready to be defined. But our process of dating these terms goes back to sources like the ones that Gretchen McCulloch is citing in this book, Because Internet.
When we're actually looking for the dating information, we go back to sources that are not published edited text. And we are now in this position where the public has questions about the meanings of these abbreviations.
Peter Sokolowski:
Yes.
Emily Brewster:
And we are figuring out ways to talk about them without changing our criteria for entry because we can't do that. But we can answer questions about what these things mean.
Peter Sokolowski:
Oh, sure.
Ammon Shea:
And also, I think it's worth pointing out that our criteria for entry are not uniform across the industry. There are particularly, say in cases of slang lexicography, I know there are some lexicographers who have dated things based on visual and auditory evidence. They're watching a TV or a movie. They'll date things based on that kind of use, which is totally acceptable as well, of course. It's just a different focus on where you're getting your evidence from and what kind of evidence you're linking. Some dictionaries would only use words for movies if they had a copy of the script, which is making a little bit of a nice point of it. If the word's being used, it's clearly being used. But every dictionary has their own criteria for this sort of thing.
Emily Brewster:
I remember, it was maybe around 2003 or so, I was emailing with a friend and she's a technical writer. And she signed off her email with TTFN, and I was so confused. I just had no idea what TTFN meant. And she replied very kindly and told me that it means "ta-ta for now." I've always liked that, TTFN. This is from someone who never would say "ta-ta for now." That was not something that she would ever say to me. But in an email, she used that as a sign-off, TTFN. My sister-in-law and I have a habit of ending our messages to one another with just a whole line of indiscriminate letters all mashed together as just a jocular way of poking fun at such the sign-offs as TTFN.
Ammon Shea:
I wouldn't have guessed "ta-ta for now" from TTFN, to be honest with you. I would've thought it was something a little more fricative and insulting.
Emily Brewster:
Let us know what you think about Word Matters. Review us wherever you get your podcasts or email us at wordmatters@m-w.com You can also visit us at nepm.org. And for the word of the day and all your general dictionary needs, visit merriam-webster.com.
Our theme music is by Tobias Voigt. Artwork by Annie Jacobson. Word Matters is produced by John Voci. For Ammon Shea and Peter Sokolowski, I'm Emily Brewster. Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media.
