We love to reduce an organization’s name, whenever possible, to an acronym; but some of the abbreviations we think are acronyms aren’t at all!
Let me ask you a couple of questions.
First, what do NATO, Laser, Scuba, and OPEC have in common?
Second, what do the CIA, FAA, IRS and USA have in common?
If you said both groups were abbreviations, you are correct.
You might have been thrown off by the inclusion of laser and scuba. Laser is an abbreviation which stands for “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation,” while scuba stands for “self-contained underwater breathing apparatus.”
But if you said both groups were acronyms, you would be incorrect.
That distinction belongs to only one of the two sets: the first one. Here’s why.
An acronym is an abbreviation of letters that can be pronounced as a word. NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, for example, is said as a word, not a list of letters. The letters themselves form a pronounceable word that is generally referred to as the word, not the individual letters.
The second set suffers from one simple shortcoming: they are regarded as non-pronounceable. That’s sort of ironic, I acknowledge: CIA could be pronounced as “see-ah.” FAA could be “fah” and even the good old USA could be pronounced “you-sah.” But they aren’t. In those cases, we say the abbreviation letter by letter, thereby disqualifying them from “acronym”  status.
So what do we call that second set? Instead of an acronym, they’re examples of initialisms. Those are abbreviations that are said aloud only as the string of letters.
AIDS, which stands for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, is pronounced as a word, so it’s an acronym. HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus, the cause of AIDS, would be pronounceable as a word, but it isn’t: It is referred to by the letters, so it’s an initialism.
Now that you know this, you might be one step closer to winning your next trivia-based board game.
You’re welcome.
