# When did LASER become laser? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [January 1, 2022, 6:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-laser-become-laser/957041 "2022-01-01T18:17:07Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 15\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![beowulff](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/beowulff/32/542_2.png) [@beowulff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/beowulff)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2022, 6:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-laser-become-laser/957041/1 "2022-01-01T18:17:07Z")
Most people here (but, maybe not all) know that LASER is an acronym. It stands for Light Amplified by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. When LASERs were first invented, the name was always capitalized. But, at some point LASER became something else, and now it’s a word - laser. When did this happen, and is there a term for this? ---
**Author:** ![dolphinboy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dolphinboy/32/330_2.png) [@dolphinboy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dolphinboy)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2022, 6:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-laser-become-laser/957041/2 "2022-01-01T18:26:34Z")
According to [this](https://www.grammarly.com/blog/abbreviations/)… “Occasionally, an acronym becomes so commonplace that it evolves into an ordinary word that people no longer think of as an acronym. The words _scuba_ and _laser_, for instance, originated as acronyms ( **s** elf **c** ontained **u** nderwater **b** reathing **a** pparatus and **l** ight **a** mplification by **s** timulated **e** mission of **r** adiation, respectively).” ---
**Author:** ![carnivorousplant](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnivorousplant/32/3563_2.png) [@carnivorousplant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carnivorousplant)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2022, 9:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-laser-become-laser/957041/3 "2022-01-01T21:30:57Z")
Radio Detection And Ranging. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2022, 9:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-laser-become-laser/957041/4 "2022-01-01T21:44:26Z")
It must have happened pretty quickly because the acronym was invented in 1959, but while I started reading around 1974-1975, I have no memory at all of encountering the word styled in any other way but as a common noun. ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2022, 9:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-laser-become-laser/957041/5 "2022-01-01T21:50:57Z")
I wonder whether the term to describe this process is “reification”, the process by which a concept becomes a thing (Latin res for thing). ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2022, 9:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-laser-become-laser/957041/6 "2022-01-01T21:59:53Z")
It was already being used as just “laser” by 1964. I used Google Ngram to find the earliest uses. It gave me this URL for a chart of its uses. If you click on the button at the bottom that says “1800 - 1972”, you will find a list of hundreds of uses of it up to 1972. I’ll let you search for the earliest use: > **[Google Books Ngram Viewer](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=laser&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Claser%3B%2Cc0)** > > Google Books Ngram Viewer ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2022, 10:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-laser-become-laser/957041/7 "2022-01-01T22:04:18Z")
I did a newspaper search. The laser was announced on July 7, 1960. It was spelled all lower case in the syndicated articles. Another article was syndicated in October that used both LASER and laser. Stories from 1961 used LASER and Laser but mostly laser. I don’t see any time in which LASER was the common term. I checked some random later dates and all the articles used laser. What kind of publications were you thinking of? Scientific articles might have had a different convention. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2022, 10:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-laser-become-laser/957041/8 "2022-01-01T22:13:46Z")
Here’s another chart from Google Ngram which makes it look like the term goes back well into the 1950s and even the 1940s, but again you’ll have to page through the webpages that come up when you click on the buttons at the bottom: > **[Google Books Ngram Viewer](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=laser&year_start=1800&year_end=1959&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Claser%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Claser%3B%2Cc0)** > > Google Books Ngram Viewer Note that there was a plant (or maybe a drug) and a last name that accounts for some of the early entries. ---
**Author:** ![susan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/susan/32/17537_2.png) [@susan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/susan)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2022, 10:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-laser-become-laser/957041/9 "2022-01-01T22:17:11Z")
Cf. “covid,” “aids.” ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Strangelove](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr.strangelove/32/6613_2.png) [@Dr.Strangelove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Strangelove)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2022, 10:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-laser-become-laser/957041/10 "2022-01-01T22:21:26Z")
The maser came before the laser, and the laser was named by analogy with the maser (light amplification vs. microwave amplification). I think we can assume the casing rules came from maser as well. I believe this is the very first paper on the maser, from 1955: [https://journals.aps.org/pr/pdf/10.1103/PhysRev.99.1264](https://journals.aps.org/pr/pdf/10.1103/PhysRev.99.1264) > We call an apparatus utilizing this technique a “maser,” which is an acronym for microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation." Despite calling it an acronym, it also spells maser in lowercase. So it was that way from the very start–it was _never_ MASER (or LASER). ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2022, 10:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-laser-become-laser/957041/11 "2022-01-01T22:32:38Z")
> [@susan](#): > > Cf. “covid,” “aids.” Maybe this is a country difference, but in Canada, and the USA as far as I know, the disease caused by HIV is styled AIDS, not “aids.” ---
**Author:** ![Bullitt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bullitt/32/5725_2.png) [@Bullitt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bullitt)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2022, 10:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-laser-become-laser/957041/12 "2022-01-01T22:54:53Z")
Zone Improvement Plan ---
**Author:** ![Bootb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e19b73/32.png) [@Bootb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bootb)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2022, 11:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-laser-become-laser/957041/13 "2022-01-01T23:14:16Z")
> [@RickJay](#): > > Maybe this is a country difference, but in Canada, and the USA as far as I know, the disease caused by HIV is styled AIDS, not “aids.” I am not an expert, but from reading British newspapers online, there definitely seems to be a difference between British English and American/Canadian English in terms of capitalizing terms like that. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [January 2, 2022, 2:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-laser-become-laser/957041/14 "2022-01-02T02:00:29Z")
I grew up a few blocks away from a Laser St. that definitely predated the LASER by decades. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [January 2, 2022, 4:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-laser-become-laser/957041/15 "2022-01-02T04:20:33Z")
Interesting bit of trivia here – the folks at Bell Labs (lead by Arthur Schawlow and Charles Townes) insisted on using the term “Optical Maser”, rather than “Laser” > [@](#): > > When the coherent optical oscillator was first imagined in 1957, it was originally called the “optical maser”. This was ultimately changed to _laser_ for “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation”. > … > > The principle and concept of stimulated emission has since been extended to more devices and frequencies. Thus, the original acronym is sometimes modified, as suggested by Charles H. Townes,[[1]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maser#cite_note-nobel_lecture-1) to " _molecular_ amplification by stimulated emission of radiation." Some have asserted that Townes’s efforts to extend the acronym in this way were primarily motivated by the desire to increase the importance of his invention, and his reputation in the scientific community.[[18]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maser#cite_note-18) > **[Maser](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maser)** > > A maser is a device that produces coherent electromagnetic waves (microwaves), through amplification by stimulated emission. The term is an acronym for microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. The first maser was built by Charles H. Townes, James P. Gordon, and Herbert J. Zeiger at Columbia University in 1953. Townes, Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prokhorov were awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics for theoretical work leading to the maser. Masers are also used as the timekee... You could tell if a paper was coming out of Bell Labs by their stubborn insistence on calling it an “Optical Maser” Although Elias Snitzer of American Optical called his neodymium glass device an “optical Maser”. Ted Maiman, who made the first working laser, sidestepped the whole thing by titling his paper “Stimulated Optical Radiation in Ruby” Schawlow and Townes’ paper: [https://laserfest.org/lasers/history/paper-optical-maser.pdf](https://laserfest.org/lasers/history/paper-optical-maser.pdf) But in 1963 Amnon Yariv and J.P. Gordon published “The Laser” in the Proceedings of the IEEE. Note that it’s not all caps: [https://authors.library.caltech.edu/1379/1/YARprocieee63a.pdf](https://authors.library.caltech.edu/1379/1/YARprocieee63a.pdf) Gorgon Gould is credited with proposing the name “Laser” in his notebooks and in a paper at a conference in 1959. Conference proceedings, unlike journal articles, aren’t as well-known, and I suspect Gould’s proposed name didn’t receive a lot of recognition until the court case regarding his credit. To be honest, the change from MASER (Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) to LASER (substituting “Light” for “Microwave” is so obvious as to be a no-brainer