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. It's really a remarkable success, isn't it? As you say, the most popular word in the English language. And obviously, what it conveyed was an intent to be humorous, that that lighthearted use was abbreviated as OK. All correct? OK? Explain.Īmmon 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. 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. We actually do give that information, so that's an interesting one.Īctually, if you want cocktail party fodder about acronyms and initialisms, A-sap, A-S-A-P, is your word to bring. We do give A-sap as a variant, phonetic field for A-S-A-P. So you do want to know them well enough to know that initialism just means you say the initials, I guess. 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.Īnd 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. Sometimes they use it to refer to A-S-A-P, and sometimes they use it to refer to A-sap. We say this because this is how people use the word acronym. And we say this not because we're making a judgment call. So we kind of say ASAP could be called an initialism and it could be called an acronym. Of course, though, we do define acronym as an initialism as well. But if you say A-S-A-P, it is very specifically an initialism. If you say A-sap, then it just magically becomes an acronym. So A-S-A-P, we don't say A-sap, although I have said A-sap, actually. 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. 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.īecause we don't pronounce them as their. That's why an acronym is not from specifically the first letter of a set of words. So for example, radar comes from "radio detection and ranging."Īnd the r-a of radar at the beginning is from the first two letters of radio.
An acronym is an abbreviation that is made of the first letter or letters of a series of words. And then we also have acronyms and initialisms.Īcronym is the broader category. 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. We shorten it for convenience or for fun. And abbreviations are kind of word wannabes. 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.Īmong the different variety of lexical items in the English language, we have a category called abbreviations. I'm Emily Brewster, and Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media. When is an abbreviation an acronym, and when is an acronym also an initialism? This episode is all about abbreviations.Ĭoming up on Word Matters, all about abbreviations.