I’m looking for acronyms/initialisms which are still in use, used to stand for something, but no longer do.
One example is BP. It used to stand for British Petroleum, but is now just BP.
Another is CERN. It used to stand for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Council for Nuclear Research in French). The full name was changed to Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire, but the original acronym was kept.
What other examples of this kind of thing are there?
KFC
Inevitable Wikipedia list of what they call “orphan initialisms.”
AOL
Every day I watch train cars owned by BNSF go by my house. Once upon a time these initials stood for the name of a rail company, Burlington Northern Santa Fe. My understanding is that today the company’s name is simply BNSF.
The NatWest (a bank in the UK) used to be the National Westminster Bank.
You see this a lot where a company has created a holding company to be a division of, so that the holding company can buy other companies and make then into other divisions. One that I rememver seeing around Toronto is the trucks of “Gordon Food Services, a GFS Holdings Company”. For some reason, this naming practice irritates me.
Qantas.
Company name used to be “Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services Limited” but is now “Qantas Airways Limited.”
SAS (the computer program, not the airline or the special forces). Was Statistical Analysis System. It’s now just SAS.
UNICEF. It formerly was an acronym for the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund but now the organization is called the United Nations Children’s Fund.
3M, I think.
TWAIN, a scanner technology, was never an acronym, but people have construed it to mean “Technology Without An Interesting Name”
ESPN
BNSF
AT&T?
The BNSF is actually the reverse of this in that the letters actually still stand for something in the holding company. It’s “BNSF Railway, a subsidiary of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corporation.”
How would you classify something like “MP3” which means barely anything and nothing relevant to its main use?
I’d put “USB” in this category- the average punter doesn’t know (or care) what “Universal Serial Bus” is, but knows perfectly well that their computer has a number of USB ports on it and they can plug pretty much anything with a “USB connection” into it.
The CN Tower.
GE
GM
Snafu
Radar
Sonar
ASCII (no one remembers the original acronym)
Basic (the computer language, though I suppose it’s not in use all that much any more).
oops missed