Use of Acronyms and Initialisms in discussions

The 722 people who viewed my post have inspired me to take one more step. I have compiled a little over 200 abbreviations, initialisms and acronyms that I will post here. This is just a beginning and I bet you can find several that should be on the list that I have forgotten or missed. If you think something should be on the list that is relevant to our conversations let me know. Also if I have incorrectly listed any of the below let me know. I will wait and try to produce an updated list in the near future.

Thanks John

Hi John,

Wow, you're dedicated, to have compiled this list : )

It's good that you bring this up.

I too agree, it's always good practice to see the full expansion at least the first time, and then abbreviations can be acceptable in the rest of the article in question. However, I guess a few are generally accepted, such as V for volt since it is a unit. Hard to know what to do with those.

There is a school of thought that any two-letter abbreviations are better always expanded throughout the article, rather than only expanding at the first mention of it. So, for example NO and NC should always be expanded to normally open and normally closed, and NO and NC should not appear in an article according to that principle. I don't always follow it 100%, but it's a good guideline and common-sense can be used.

shabaz wrote:

 

There is a school of thought that any two-letter abbreviations are better always expanded throughout the article, rather than only expanding at the first mention of it. So, for example NO and NC should always be expanded to normally open and normally closed, and NO and NC should not appear in an article according to that principle. I don't always follow it 100%, but it's a good guideline and common-sense can be used.

I think the key factors are common sense and know your audience.  If I'm writing about FPGAs in the FPGA group, it's pretty silly and patronizing to expand it as Field-Programmable Gate Array, even the first time.  If it's for a general audience, then I should expand FPGA, though for most people the expanded form doesn't provide that much more information   (Riiight... what's a gate array?)

As for expanding two-letter initialisms each time: I'm not going to expand IP into Internet Protocol (or Intellectual Property) on each use and I don't think my readers want me to.  The whole point of initialisms is that humans are good at working with symbols and spelling them out unnecessarily gets tiresome IMO.  I love most Dashiell Hammett books, but I find The Glass Key really irritating because the main character is Ned Beaumont and every time DH mentions him it's always "Ned Beaumont".  Never "Ned", never "Beaumont", just Ned Beaumont, Ned Beaumont, Ned Beaumont over and over.

JAFMA

The interesting part with acronyms is that you'll often find that two people with a differing history of companies they've worked for will have wildly different interpretations for the same TLA, or equally two totally different ones for the same thing. For example, two places I worked for used CND and NFF for essentially the same thing. I try to avoid using TLAs for reasons like this, I'm probably not totally successful though

One of my favorites is PCMCIA: People Cannot Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms

I was trying to guess CND/NFF and all I could think of was Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and then Nuclear Failure something as a guess : ) I needed to type it into google to find out what it really meant. The places I've worked, it would be a single-letter abbreviation, "U" (Unreproducible) if I've interpreted it correctly.

I can see the point that sometimes it's not desirable to expand, e.g. FPGA in an FPGA group, and guidelines are made to be sometimes broken. Sometimes I've found an audience is really not aware of certain abbreviations or even buzzwords, although I thought they should have been aware (i.e. my bad judgement - and it gets harder with technology that is just a year or two old, it might not have permeated as quickly as I had thought). It's a hard balance. Others I've forgotten (like TRIAC - I know what it is, but not what the abbreviation is any longer) due to passage of time. But then, possibly people don't need to know what TRIAC stands for, since it has almost become a word (much like RADAR). I just checked what TRIAC stands for, and it could be an anachronism to today try to understand the expansion.

So there are loads of subtleties to be factored in and always exceptions to guidelines.

I also see extremely long abbreviations like EoMPLSoGRE and they are generally expanded the first time, although it may be done in sections (i.e. EoMPLS is expanded and discussed, and then the oGRE bit is expanded.

Hi Shabaz  By the way congrats on your great interview. It is really interesting to learn more about the people behind the posts. I realized I was going over board with the single letter entries but once one is started it is hard to know where to draw the line so I threw them in. The one that push me over the edge and into action was the FPGA. I could not figure it out and had to do some research. John Beetem is correct, I still do not know what it is but at least now I can put the words to the letters. It sounds interesting and I will have to budget some time to learn a little more. Thanks again for your feedback.

John

Nice list.

When I started at Airways the acronyms were an issue, so I asked if we had a list.

4 A4 pages later was the best they could do, and it wasn't complete.

We had a boss once that insisted on using them in his morning roundup talk, but never really explained them.

In the end we started making some of our own up and he never did ask what they meant.

mark

I usually define the acronym the first time I use it in a post, then proceed to use the acronym afterwards. Just like you mentioned.

shabaz wrote:

 

I was trying to guess CND/NFF and all I could think of was Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and then Nuclear Failure something as a guess : ) I needed to type it into google to find out what it really meant. The places I've worked, it would be a single-letter abbreviation, "U" (Unreproducible) if I've interpreted it correctly.

Sounds like you've got it right, but perfect example is that you have yet another way to denote the same thing.

When I used to work for a subcontract board manufacturer we used CND and could never work out why one of our customers sent some percentage of failed boards back to us labeled NFF. Later I changed job and started working for that same customer and discovered what NFF meant to them, and therefore also that whoever they had sorting out the returns didn't understand the acronym either!