# Acrocrostic

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/acrocrostic/818649>\
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\
**Created:** [July 27, 2018, 12:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/acrocrostic/818649 "2018-07-27T00:02:14Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![DavidwithanR](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/3bc359/32.png) [@DavidwithanR](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DavidwithanR)\
**Post date:** [July 30, 2018, 8:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/acrocrostic/818649/21 "2018-07-30T08:41:39Z")

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> [@dtilque](#):
>
> Acrostic: a message in some text. You compose the message (often, but not necessarily, a single word) and then write text where the first letter of each word, line, sentence, or paragraph is your message. The text can be anything; originally they were usually poems (acrostics go back a long ways in English and even further in Latin and Greek.)

An acrostic is a message, yes, or at least an intelligible piece of information, and as you described, that word is the primary piece of information that you **already have, before** you start trying to create an acrostic. HOMES, STEM, and ABBA are not messages or information. They’re just acronyms. In the not-very-good acrostic that I wrote, there’s an intelligible piece of information conveyed by the acrostic word, one that can’t be deduced from the meaning of the rest of the words. ABBA is just an abbreviation of four people’s names. HOMES happens to be a word, but isn’t being used as a word - it’s not referring to anyone’s homes, just acting as a convenient and memorable collection of letters.

If you capriciously redefine “Acrostic” so that its definition just says “see Acronym”, then of course you’re going to find some similarities. 🙂

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**Author:** ![DavidwithanR](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/3bc359/32.png) [@DavidwithanR](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DavidwithanR)\
**Post date:** [July 30, 2018, 8:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/acrocrostic/818649/22 "2018-07-30T08:50:12Z")

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Example: if ABBA was acrostic-like, then they would have started with the familiar word “Abba” that everyone already knew before the band was formed(??), and then worked hard to come up with four lines of clever text that started with those letters.

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**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\
**Post date:** [July 30, 2018, 6:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/acrocrostic/818649/23 "2018-07-30T18:12:41Z")

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It probably doesn’t fit OP’s desire, but interesting nonetheless is [a 1948 paper on nucleo-synthesis (the same cosmology topic Chronos has invoked to respond to my queries IIUC)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpher%E2%80%93Bethe%E2%80%93Gamow_paper).

The student went on to win physics prizes and the teacher was already very renowned, but to give the paper some “class” the teacher asked his friend and future Nobel Prize winner Hans Bethe to co-author this famous **Alpher–Bethe–Gamow paper,** or **αβγ paper**.

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**Author:** ![dtilque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)\
**Post date:** [July 30, 2018, 6:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/acrocrostic/818649/24 "2018-07-30T18:17:33Z")

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Fine, great, I’m not going to nitpick definitions with you. Call them Acronyms That Aren’t Abbreviations (ATAA) if it makes you feel better. (ETA: this was addressed to DavidwithanR)

But I would still like more of them. Anyone?

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