Sometimes shorter is better, especially when it comes to lines at the airport or how long you wait on hold with the cable company. Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet that brevity is the source of wit; it’s also the key component of abbreviations. Certain abbreviations have become an indelible part of the English lexicon, and some of these newly coined phrases have superseded their original meaning altogether. For instance, if you say, “répondez s’il vous plaît,” you’re likely to get confused stares. But write “RSVP” on an invitation, and people will know exactly what you mean.
The point of abbreviations is to make things more concise and easy to understand, but there are different types, and the distinctions affect how they are used. Any shortening of a word or term is an abbreviation (from the Latin brevis, meaning “short”), but two of the more popular forms are acronyms and initialisms. Let’s take a look at what makes each one unique.
An acronym is a word formed from specific letters of the individual words it represents. Most often this means taking the first letter of each of those words — for example, “NASA” stands for “National Aeronautics and Space Administration.” Another defining trait for acronyms is how they’re pronounced: An acronym sounds like a word in itself instead of a series of individual letters. Other familiar acronyms include “POTUS” (president of the United States), “VIN” (vehicle identification number), and one of the most recent, “YOLO” (you only live once). Occasionally, an acronym will become so ubiquitous that it’s adopted as a standard word in the dictionary — “radar” (radio detection and ranging) and “scuba” (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus), for example.
Initialisms are formed in the same way as acronyms, often using the first letters of each word. (An exception might be if a second letter is chosen, or an article is skipped.) The major difference, however, is that each individual letter of the initialism is pronounced. Common examples include “USA” (United States of America), “HTML” (Hypertext Markup Language), and “BTW” (by the way). BTW, there are a few, albeit rare examples of abbreviations that can be treated as both acronyms and initialisms. One prime example of this is “ASAP,” which is commonly pronounced as either “EH-sap” or “A-S-A-P.”
