Abbreviations
Q. I had always understood the term acronym to mean an abbreviation that spells a word, such as snafu (per Webster’s), but in your manual [the fourteenth edition, 1993] the two terms are used interchangeably. Can you tell me where you get your definition of acronym?
A. Since 1993, we’ve realized that we needed to be more precise. In the fifteenth edition, therefore, we distinguish between acronyms, initialisms, and contractions, all under the umbrella of abbreviation, as follows: acronym refers only to terms based on the initial letters of their various elements and read as single words (NATO, AIDS); initialism to terms read as a series of letters (BBC, ATM); and contraction to abbreviations that include the first and last letters of the full word (Mr., amt.). These distinctions can also be found in the multivolume work Acronyms, Initialisms, and Abbreviations Dictionary, edited by Mary Rose Bonk and published in its twenty-seventh edition in 2000 by Gale Research Incorporated.
