I had always thought that an “acronym” was an abbreviation comprising the first letters of each of the words (or major words) to be subsumed under the abbreviation,–in cases where the abbreviation itself is a word (e.g., CAT for Canadian Association of Transportation))_.
I now find that dictionaries don’t impose this constraint on an acronym. Thus, for example, NAACP is an “acronym” even though “NAACP” is not a word.
Is there a word for an acronym that DOES spell a word (and not acronyms that don’t)??
“Initialism” is NAACP and IBM. “Acronym” is, as you say sort of backwards, pronounceable as something other than letter names by anyone so inclined, so people who say “Nacap” would give you grief on the definition examples. Probably they’d be members of the US military.
FWIW, Hebrew usage seems incapable of not acronyming anything under the sun, no matter how outlandish the phonemes seem to clash. I’m sure linguistics people have taken a swing at that.
ETA: Re your hed: Instead of “Dem’s fighting’ woids” I may now use “Those strike me as pelling words” (and I will relish the reduplication). Once a verb, it now lives in “pell-mell.”
Everyone I know agrees CAT is the Communications Authority of Thailand (or Caterpillar Inc).
CAT’s 1544 service provides telephone service from the Land of Smiles™ to the Home of the Brave™ for about 2 or 3¢ per minute. (I think they also offer a similarly cheap service for the vice versa.)
The idea that an acronym must spell a word or be pronounced as other than a sequence of letters is something that anal-retentive nerds came up with. Your typical person doesn’t care about that. General usage is that any abbreviation made up of the inital letters of a multi-word term is an acronym. Dictionaries follow general usage.
So there isn’t a word that the OP is asking about. The closest is when an abbreviation is chosen first (usually the same as a word that means something significant to the concept/thing/organization being named) and then the expansion is generated from that. Those are called bacronyms. Personally, I hate bacronyms.
There are loads of these, worth looking into just to remind ourselves that we all can end up believing stuff that ain’t so.
e.g. “SOS” didn’t stand for anything, it was originally just a distinctive and quickly transmitted series but was retrofitted to “save our souls” and similar
“POSH” doesn’t stand for “port out, starboard home” it was never an acronym to start with.
I was also surprised to hear a commentary on a London river taxi state confidently that “wharf” stood for “warehouse at river frontage”, utter nonsense of course. It is a very old word and acronyms in general were not widely used before the 20th century.
The one that always makes me cringe (for many reasons) is the act that passed Congress in 2001: the "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001”, or the USA PATRIOT Act.
There’s a slight distinction that this is a tortured or contrived acronym, but it was always an acronym. Strictly speaking a bacronym is something like SOS that was not short for anything originally.
If there’s a useful—or at least a noticeable—distinction, it seems perfectly natural to me that there would be separate terminology. The problem is that not everyone makes that distinction. From Wikipedia:
So perhaps “word acronym” fits what the OP is looking for, except that it’s not in common usage.
“You’re working for the Secure Homeland Initiative, Enforcement and Logistics Division. What does that mean to you?”
“It means that someone really wanted our name to spell out ‘shield’.”
Back to the OP, it seems to me that there are actually three different categories:
Abbreviations which aren’t pronounceable as anything other than the letters, like NCAA and BMI
Abbreviations which are pronounceable and form new words, like NASA and RADAR
Abbreviations which form previously-existing words, like ἰχθύς or USA PATRIOT
My favorite such word is “swag”. Somewhere along the way, someone decided that “swag” was actually an acronym as it related to conventions, standing for “Stuff We All Get”. You know, the little tchotchkes that they give out at booths, toys and knickknacks and pens and whatnot they give away to advertise something. The word “swag”, of course, way predates conventions. Snopes even has a page on it.
Ok is not short for Okay, another word people believed was an acronym, it was never a longer or different spelling. I’ve seen some people use periods after O. and K. Believing it stood for 2 words, spelled out as 4 letters by others, what would they stand for in general purpose? Ok being an agreement of acknowledgement, your thoughts or suggestions. I’m thinking officially keen… like if you were really hip to an idea or thought you would be ok, or officially keen to it! I think I’m officially keen to this ok acronym, you dig? Lol
OK is an acronym, one of the earliest in the English language. It stands for “Oll Korrect”, a deliberately-humorous misspelling of “All Correct”. “Okay” is just a phonetic rendition of the letters.
People back in the 1830s were just as fond of slang initialisms as people today are, and “O.K.” was just one of several such popular abbreviations (some others that haven’t held up as well over time are “N.G.” for “no go”, i.e., “no way”, and “N.S.” for “nuff said” = “enough said”.) The nickname “Old Kinderhook” of contemporary politician (later President) Martin Van Buren helped perpetuate the use of “O.K.” and the subsequent folk etymologies about its derivation.
Well, I think you’re to be congratulated for coming up with a backronym version of this abbreviation that manages to be almost as ponderous and try-hard as the original expression!
Others have pointed out that it is in fact an acronym.
But even if it were not, why do you think it is strange for it to be written either as “O.K.” or “okay”? What would be strange would be for a single complete word “ok” to have that pronunciation, surely?
I disagree that it[USA PATRIOT Act] is not a bacronym. It’s most likely they came up with the name and then tortured the language to produce the expansion. That’s exactly what a bacronym is. It’s actually a somewhat common practice among lawmakers. No doubt they feel it increases the chances of the law being passed if they can come up with a nice feel-good name, even if the name has little to do with what the law actually does (this law being a case in point).
Personal observation. I’ll also observe that the SDMB has a greater than usual concentration of said anal-retentive nerds, so I expect to have lots of disagreement. back at you
More categories:
[ul]
[li]Pronounceable acronyms that became official words: like scuba and laser[/li][li]Unpronouncable acronyms that became words anyway: like okay and emcee.[/li][/ul]
