Pseudo-acronyms and orphan initialisms Some apparent acronyms or other abbreviations do not stand for anything and cannot be expanded to some meaning. Such pseudo-acronyms may be pronunciation-based, such as "BBQ" (
bee-bee-cue), for "barbecue", and "K9" (
kay-nine) for "canine". Pseudo-acronyms also frequently develop as "orphan initialisms": an existing acronym is redefined as a non-acronymous name, severing its link to its previous meaning. For example, the letters of the "
SAT", a US college entrance test originally dubbed "Scholastic Aptitude Test", no longer officially stand for anything. The US-based
abortion-rights organization "
NARAL" was another example of this; in that case, the organization changed its name several times, with the long-form of the name always corresponding to the letters "NARAL", later opting to simply be known by the short-form, without being connected to a long-form, and finally dropping the term to become
Reproductive Freedom for All. This is common with companies that want to retain
brand recognition while moving away from an outdated image: American Telephone and Telegraph became
AT&T Russia Today has rebranded itself as
RT.
American Movie Classics has simply rebranded itself as AMC.
Genzyme Transgenics Corporation became GTC Biotherapeutics, Inc.;
The Learning Channel became TLC;
MTV dropped the name Music Television out of its brand; and
American District Telegraph became simply known as ADT. "
Kentucky Fried Chicken" went partway, re-branding itself with its initialism "KFC" to de-emphasize the role of frying in the preparation of its signature dishes, though they have since returned to using both interchangeably. The East Coast Hockey League became the
ECHL when it expanded to include cities in the western United States prior to the 2003–2004 season. Pseudo-acronyms may have advantages in international markets: for example, some national
affiliates of
International Business Machines are legally incorporated with "IBM" in their names (for example, IBM Canada) to avoid translating the full name into local languages. Likewise,
UBS is the name of the merged
Union Bank of Switzerland and
Swiss Bank Corporation, and
HSBC has replaced the long name Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. Some companies which have a name giving a clear indication of their place of origin will choose to use acronyms when expanding to foreign markets: for example,
Toronto-Dominion Bank sometimes continues to operate under its full name in Canada, but its U.S. subsidiary is known only as
TD Bank, just as
Royal Bank of Canada sometimes still uses its full name in Canada (a
constitutional monarchy) while its U.S. subsidiary is always only called
RBC Bank. The India-based
JSW Group of companies is another example of the original name (Jindal South West Group) being re-branded into a pseudo-acronym while expanding into other geographical areas in and outside of India.
Redundant acronyms and RAS syndrome Rebranding can lead to
redundant acronym syndrome, as when
Trustee Savings Bank became TSB Bank, or when
Railway Express Agency became REA Express. A few
high-tech companies have taken the redundant acronym to the extreme: for example, ISM Information Systems Management Corp. and SHL Systemhouse Ltd. Examples in entertainment include the television shows
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and
Navy: NCIS ("Navy" was dropped in the second season), where the redundancy was likely designed to educate new viewers as to what the initials stood for. The same reasoning was in evidence when the
Royal Bank of Canada's Canadian operations rebranded to RBC Royal Bank, or when
Bank of Montreal rebranded their retail banking subsidiary BMO Bank of Montreal. Another common example is "
RAM memory", which is redundant because "RAM" ("random-access memory") includes the initial of the word "memory". "PIN" stands for "personal identification number", obviating the second word in "
PIN number"; in this case its retention may be motivated to avoid ambiguity with the homophonous word "pin". Other examples include "
ATM machine", "
EAB bank", "HIV virus", Microsoft's
NT Technology, and the formerly redundant "
SAT test", now simply "SAT Reasoning Test").
TNN (The Nashville/National Network) also renamed itself "The New TNN" for a brief interlude.
Redefined acronyms In some cases, while the initials in an acronym may stay the same, for what those letters stand may change. Examples include the following: • DVD was originally an acronym for the unofficial term "digital video disc", but is now stated by the
DVD Forum as standing for "Digital Versatile Disc" •
GAO changed the full form of its name from "General Accounting Office" to "Government Accountability Office" •
GPO changed the full form of its name from "Government Printing Office" to "Government Publishing Office" •
RAID was originally an acronym for "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks" but has since been redefined as "Redundant Array of Independent Disks" • The
UICC was founded as the "International Union Against Cancer", and its initials originally came from the
Romance-language versions of that name (such as French ). The English expansion of its name has since been changed to "Union for International Cancer Control" so that it would also correspond to the UICC acronym. •
WWF was originally an acronym for "World Wildlife Fund", but now stands for "World Wide Fund for Nature" (although the organization's branches in the U.S. and Canada still use the original name)
Backronyms A
backronym (or
bacronym) is a
phrase that is constructed "after the fact" from a previously existing word. For example, the novelist and critic
Anthony Burgess once proposed that the word "book" ought to stand for "box of organized knowledge". A classic real-world example of this is the name of the predecessor to the Apple Macintosh, the
Apple Lisa, which was said to refer to "Local Integrated Software Architecture", but was actually named after Steve Jobs' daughter, born in 1978.
Contrived acronyms Contrived acronyms are deliberately designed to be apt for the thing being named (by having a dual meaning or by borrowing the positive connotations of an existing word). Some examples of contrived acronyms are
USA PATRIOT,
CAN SPAM,
CAPTCHA,
DOGE and
ACT UP. The clothing company
French Connection began referring to itself as
fcuk, standing for "French Connection United Kingdom". The company then created T-shirts and several advertising campaigns that exploit the acronym's similarity to the taboo word "
fuck". Contrived acronyms find frequent use as names of
fictional agencies, with a famous example being frequent
James Bond antagonist organization
SPECTRE (Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion). The
U.S. Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (
DARPA) is known for developing contrived acronyms to name projects, including
RESURRECT,
NIRVANA, and
DUDE. In July 2010,
Wired magazine reported that DARPA announced programs to "transform biology from a descriptive to a predictive field of science" named
BATMAN and
ROBIN for "Biochronicity and Temporal Mechanisms Arising in Nature" and "Robustness of Biologically-Inspired Networks", a reference to comic-book superheroes
Batman and
Robin. The short-form
names of clinical trials and other scientific studies constitute a large class of acronyms that includes many contrived examples, as well as many with a partial rather than complete correspondence of letters to expansion components. These trials tend to have full names that are accurately descriptive of what the trial is about but are thus also too long to serve practically as names within the syntax of a sentence, so a short name is also developed, which can serve as a syntactically useful handle and also provide at least a degree of
mnemonic reminder as to the full name. Examples widely known in medicine include the ALLHAT trial (Antihypertensive and Lipid-Lowering Treatment to Prevent Heart Attack Trial) and the CHARM trial (Candesartan in Heart Failure: Assessment of Reduction in Mortality and Morbidity). The fact that
RAS syndrome is often involved, as well as that the letters often do not entirely match, have sometimes been pointed out by annoyed researchers preoccupied by the idea that because the
archetypal form of acronyms originated with one-to-one letter matching, there must be some impropriety in their ever deviating from that form. However, the purpose of clinical trial acronyms, as with
gene and protein symbols, is simply to have a syntactically usable and easily
recalled short name to complement the long name that is often syntactically unusable and not
memorized. It is useful for the short name to give a reminder of the long name, which supports the reasonable censure of "cutesy" examples that provide little to no hint of it. But beyond that reasonably close correspondence, the short name's chief utility is in functioning cognitively as a name, rather than being a
cryptic and forgettable string, albeit faithful to the matching of letters. Other reasonable critiques have been (1) that it is irresponsible to mention trial acronyms without explaining them at least once by providing the long names somewhere in the document, and (2) that the proliferation of trial acronyms has resulted in ambiguity, such as three different trials all called ASPECT, which is another reason why failing to explain them somewhere in the document is irresponsible in scientific communication. finding both good aspects (mnemonic help, name recall) and potential flaws (
connotatively driven
bias). rather than
CLIT. In Canada, the
Canadian Conservative Reform Alliance (Party) was quickly renamed to the "Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance" when its opponents pointed out that its initials spelled CCRAP (pronounced "see
crap"). Two Irish institutes of technology (Galway and Tralee) chose different acronyms from other institutes when they were upgraded from regional technical colleges. Tralee RTC became the Institute of Technology Tralee (ITT), as opposed to Tralee Institute of Technology (
TIT). Galway RTC became Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology (GMIT), as opposed to Galway Institute of Technology (
GIT). The charity sports organization
Team in Training is known as "TNT" and not "TIT".
Technological Institute of Textile & Sciences, however, is still known as "TITS".
George Mason University was planning to name their law school the "Antonin Scalia School of Law" (
ASSOL) in honor of the late
Antonin Scalia, only to change it to the "
Antonin Scalia Law School" later.
Macronyms/nested acronyms A
macronym, or
nested acronym, is an acronym in which one or more letters stand for acronyms (or abbreviations) themselves. The word "macronym" is a
portmanteau of "
macro-" and "acronym". Some examples of macronyms are: •
XHR stands for "XML HTTP Request", in which "
XML" is "Extensible Markup Language", and
HTTP stands for "HyperText Transfer Protocol" •
POWER stands for "Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC", in which "
RISC" stands for "reduced instruction set computer" •
VHDL stands for "VHSIC Hardware Description Language", in which "
VHSIC" stands for "Very High Speed Integrated Circuit" •
XSD stands for "XML Schema Definition", in which "
XML" stands for "Extensible Markup Language" •
AIM stands for "AOL Instant Messenger", in which "
AOL" originally stood for "America Online" •
HASP stood for "Houston Automatic Spooling Priority", but "
spooling" itself was an acronym: "simultaneous peripheral operations on-line" •
VORTAC stands for "VOR+TACAN", in which "VOR" is "
VHF omnidirectional range" (where VHF = very high frequency radio) and "TAC" is short for
TACAN, which stands for "tactical air navigation" •
Global Information Assurance Certification has a number of nested acronyms for its certifications, e.g. "GSEC" is an acronym for "GIAC Security Essentials" •
RBD stands for "REM Behavior Disorder", in which "
REM" stands for "rapid eye movement" Some macronyms can be multiply nested: the second-order acronym points to another one further down a hierarchy.
VITAL, for example, which expands to "
VHDL Initiative Towards
ASIC Libraries" is a total of 15 words when fully expanded. In an informal competition run by the magazine
New Scientist, a fully documented specimen was discovered that may be the most deeply nested of all: RARS is the "Regional ATOVS Retransmission Service"; ATOVS is "Advanced TOVS"; TOVS is "
TIROS operational vertical sounder"; and TIROS is "Television infrared observational satellite". Fully expanded, "RARS" might thus become "Regional Advanced Television Infrared Observational Satellite Operational Vertical Sounder Retransmission Service", which would produce the much more unwieldy acronym "RATIOSOVSRS". However, to say that "RARS" stands directly for that string of words, or can be interchanged with it in
syntax (in the same way that "CHF" can be usefully interchanged with "congestive heart failure"), is a
prescriptive misapprehension rather than a linguistically accurate description; the true nature of such a term is closer to
anacronymic than to being interchangeable like simpler acronyms are. The latter are fully reducible in an attempt to "spell everything out and avoid all abbreviations", but the former are irreducible in that respect; they can be
annotated with parenthetical explanations, but they cannot be eliminated from speech or writing in any useful or practical way. Just as the words
laser and
radar function as words in
syntax and
cognition without a need to focus on their acronymic origins, terms such as "RARS" and "
CHA2DS2–VASc score" are irreducible in
natural language; if they are purged, the form of language that is left may conform to some imposed rule, but it cannot be described as remaining natural. Similarly,
protein and
gene nomenclature,
which uses symbols extensively, includes such terms as the name of the
NACHT protein domain, which reflects the symbols of some proteins that contain the domain – NAIP (NLR family apoptosis
inhibitor protein), C2TA (major histocompatibility complex class II transcription activator), HET-E (incompatibility locus protein from
Podospora anserine), and TP1 (telomerase-associated protein) – but is not syntactically reducible to them. The name is thus itself more symbol than acronym, and its expansion cannot replace it while preserving its function in natural syntax as a name within a
clause clearly
parsable by human readers or listeners.
Recursive acronyms A special type of macronym, the
recursive acronym, has letters whose expansion refers back to the macronym itself. One of the earliest examples appears in ''
The Hacker's Dictionary'' as
MUNG, which stands for "MUNG Until No Good". Some examples of recursive acronyms are: •
GNU stands for "GNU's Not Unix!" •
LAME stands for "LAME Ain't an MP3 Encoder" •
PHP stands for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor" •
WINE stands for "WINE Is Not an Emulator" •
HURD stands for "HIRD of Unix-replacing daemons", where HIRD itself stands for "HURD of interfaces representing depth" (a "mutually recursive" acronym) ==Non-English languages==