What was the first company name to be acronymized? Either officially or in informal use, it doesn’t matter.
Some time back I compiled a list of plane names derived from company acronyms. I later tried to find the earliest one of those. I could only find dates for a small number, but the earliest was in the early 1890s (1892, I think). Unfortunately, I can’t find the file that has that info, so I can’t say which one it was without redoing the research. At any rate, it’s unlikely the earliest example was used for the name of a town, but that gives a target date to beat.
I’d offer SPQR, except its not a company. You’ll still find it on drain covers and such, so not too shabby.
As a starter let’s try VOC - Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or the Dutch East India Company, which managed Dutch trading networks in Asia as well as possessions in island Southeast Asia, now Indonesia. Set up in 1602, the VOC mark appears on company-owned goods, in naming and all sorts of other ways.
The British East India Company and the Dutch East India Company, both founded in the early 17th Century, were referred to at the time as the EIC and the VOC, respectively.
The Insurance Company of North America was formed in 1792. All the cites I find refer to it as INA, but none state explicitly that it was known by its initials from the beginning.
It’s now part of Cigna. The Connecticut General Life Insurance Company, also a part of Cigna, formed in 1865. It is always referred to today as CG but again I can’t find a first mention. The modern name Cigna is a meld of CG and INA. My guess is that the initials have a very long history
That has the same problem as the ones in my post. Just because the company started in 1876 doesn’t mean that people used the initials starting in 1876. I didn’t find any 19th century hits in Google Books.
Based on a steady diet of black and white westerns, which may or may not bear some relation to reality, various railroad companies were usually referred to by their initials, often in conversations involving railroad barons or train robbers.
Also, people were usually just too plum lazy to say Old Kindersley Corral in full [1872].
Starting in about the mid 1800s, it was very common for companies, especially railroads, to be known by acronyms or abbreviations. It’s not just a movie thing.
The earliest reference I could find for the B&O Railroad was 1832. Are you counting something like B&O as an acronym?
They do. People have already pointed to the Dutch East India Company, which was using the cypher “VOC” pretty much from its inception in 1602, and in doing so it was only observing a practice already well-established in the political and civic fields - royal cyphers (“H.R.”, for example, used by Henry VIII of England, “R.III” used by Richard III), all the way back to the “S.P.Q.R.” cypher adopted during the late Roman Republic and in use pretty much consistently ever since. And we have the Chi-Rho and Iota-Chi cyphers used by Christians, both very ancient.
So, really, pretty much as soon as commercial corporations got going, they were likely to start using cyphers to badge their buildings and property in the same way that political, civic and ecclesiastical corporations were already doing.
I suppose the question is, at what stage did people make the transition from simply using these as badges and marks to “sounding them out”, so that they become a spoken name for the corporation concerned? There’s unlikely to be much direct literary evidnce of this; we can find all the “VOC” inscriptions we want, but they can’t tell us when, or if, people started to talk about “the Vee Oh See” (or Netherlandish euquivalent") to name the company. Unless we find some contemporary writer commenting on this trend, or on the cypher being used, say, in poetry or song lyrics in a way that suggests it will be read out this way, this is going to be a hard phenomenon to date. But I think we can guess that it doesn’t happen until basic literacy is fairly widespread. “The Vee Oh See” is meaningless to somebody who doesn’t know the alphabet.
Might be a different approach - if the acronym becomes the word because it’s foreign or not easily understood. (INRI comes to mind - everyone probably recognizes it from context but fewer know what it literally stands for. )
You’re misreading what I wrote. Of course the history you cite is true, but that’s already been mentioned in this thread.
When I wrote “My guess is that the initials have a very long history” I was referring specifically to the initials of the two predecessor Cigna companies, not any company anywhere at any time.
And again, that’s my point. I did a quick search through newspaper databases to see if those companies were referred to by their initials. No such its came up, but I admit I didn’t spend much time looking because “INA” gives hundreds of thousands of false hits. Limiting the parameters to Pennsylvania newspapers of the 19th century (INA was a Philadelphia firm) made the numbers more manageable but nothing other than the full formal name appeared.
I like the suggestion that railroad companies were the first in America to be known that way, though. That makes a lot of sense.
There’s also a distinction that might be made between sounding out the letters one at a time, versus pronouncing them as a single word. On the one hand, nobody would ever refer to a coherent light beam or the device that generates it as an “Ell Ay Ess Ee Ar”, but on the other hand, neither would anyone refer to the US intelligence agency as the “Seeah”. “Laser” is always pronounced, but “CIA” is always spelled out.
I think corporations that trade in goods or handle goods have a much greater use for initialisms, e.g., to stamp on the side of packing cases, or to mark plant and equipment belonging to them. A company that deals largely in financial services or other intangibles doesn’t have the same requirement and perhaps, for them, the utility of an initialism is not so obvious until the telegraph comes along, and then an abbreviated name becomes very convenient for use in communications.
The question was about acronyms, not mere use of initials.
I’m going to suggest NECCO (New England Confectionary Co.) as one of the first groups of company initials to be pronounced, circa 1901. Curiously, Nabisco (using the German method of concatenating syllables rather than mere letters) also dates from 1901.
I’ve been running through all the American railroad names I can think of, but can’t come up with any that were ever pronounced as words rather than initials.
Fowler’s Modern English Usage suggests the acronym first arose in World War I: ANZAC for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. The big boost in the use of acronyms comes with World War II (LORAN, SONAR, RADAR, FUBAR, AWOL pronounced as two syllables rather than four letters); the word acronym itself wasn’t coined until 1943.
As I said in the OP, at least some of the town names derived from company names date from the 1890s. I couldn’t remember which ones, so I did some look-ups of the references and found one even earlier than that:
Elco, Illinois. Named after a local store: E. Levenworth and Company General Store. When trying to decide on a name, someone noticed some boxes stacked in front of the store stencilled E. L. Co. and said, “hey, that’s a good name”. The town name was changed to Elco on Sept 11, 1878.
