Acronyms

Meaning: Words which are formed from the initial letters of other words.

Origin: When looking for the origin of an unexplained word, people sometimes suggest that the word was coined as an acronym of some phrase or other. Occasionally, that notion is correct and there are some commonly used words that we might use without necessarily being aware they are acronyms, for example 'ASAP' or 'IQ'. Words that were coined as acronyms form quite a small part of the language. Nevertheless, supposed acronym derivations are the largest source of folk etymologies - those popular fallacies about the origins of words or phrases. With many of these false derivations the word comes first and then some suitably chirpy phrase is invented to match it. These back-formations have been given the intuitive name 'backronyms'. There are many examples and two of the more common, 'posh' and 'golf' (supposedly 'port out, starboard home' and 'gentlemen only, ladies forbidden' respectively), make it onto the Nonsense Nine, our list of popular fallacies. Other backronym examples are: cop - Constable on patrol and news - North, east, west, south.

Some backronym coinages make little attempt to feign authenticity and are clearly intended to poke fun. Examples of these are, Ford - Fix or repair daily and DOS - Defunct operating system. Deciding whether an acronym's supposed origin is genuine isn't always so easy. The best place to start is the age of the word. If the word is old, then it probably isn't an acronym. The term 'acronym' itself wasn't coined until the mid 20th century.

The field of computing is now the most prolific source of acronyms - 'gif', 'ascii', 'wysiwyg', 'mpeg', not to mention the names of most programming languages, the list seems endless. Before computers, the military held top spot. Almost all of the earliest known acronyms derive from the armed forces. For example:

Anzac - Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (1915) 
Naafi - Navy, Army, and Air Force Institutes (1927) 
Gestapo - Geheime Staats-Polizei (1934) 
Waaf - Women's Auxiliary Air Force (1940)  
Radar - Radio detection and ranging (1941)

So, if someone suggests to you that the name of the 15th century game of golf was coined as an acronym, you might suggest suitable therapy, or possibly a free membership of the Committee Resisting Acronymic Proliferation. J 

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