Acronyms
'Nasa' is an acronym. It is made up of the initial letters of other words, but has come to be a new word in its own right: Nasa = North American Space Agency.
The rules around acronyms are a bit woolly unclear. They can be written in upper or lower case; sometimes the first two letters may be used, just to make the word more pronounceable.
Other examples of acronyms:
NATO - North Atlantic Treaty Organisation
Awol - Absent Without Leave
Sonar – SOnic NAvigation and Ranging
Abbreviations
These are not quite the same as acronyms. They are words that often get shortened, in speech or more commonly in written English.
For example, ‘approx.’ is an abbreviation - the first part - of the word approximately; it has been abbreviated, or shortened. Most authorities state that full-stops are needed to show that the word has been abbreviated, although words such as vet (an abbreviation of veterinarian) have become so common that no one would ever use a full-stop after it.
Other examples of abbreviations:
Dept. – department
Mr. / Mrs. / Ms. – These are such common abbreviations that the original word from which they came are hardly ever used in full
Misc. – miscellaneous
Etc. – et cetera
Initialisms
These are not the same as acronyms either!
An initialism is a type of abbreviation, made up of the initial letters of words. They tend to be pronounced as individual letters. Only if/when they are pronounced as words do they become acronyms. They tend not to need full-stops after the letters.
BBC – British Broadcasting Corporation
DVD – Digital Versatile Disc
FYI – For your information
LOL – Laugh out loud*
*At the beginning of the text-messaging era, when such initialisms really started to become popular, many people, quite understandably, thought that LOL stood for ‘lots of love’. There were reports of rather unfortunate text-message situations:
“I am sorry to tell you that Auntie Sally passed away last night. LOL, Mum”
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