Afaik the correct definition is given by Halley, the letters must form a word. Merely being pronounced like a word, for example SCSI isn't sufficient. There are also 'contracions' which are one step short of abbreviations, for example COINTEL. Technical English says an abbreviation should be written with periods as separators, for example I.B.M. or with an appended period as in Mr. and Ms.
The only answer to catching and mapping all these shortened forms is a database/list of some kind. The Oxford dictionary used to have several pages devoted to them, but I think these days there are so many from specialised fields that no-one bothers to compile them anymore. btw Lug, also = Linux User Group and an kind of knot. My most hated confusing acronym is LOD in games design which is 'level of detail' and 'last object drawn' in the engine and 'land object down' in terrain building.

In reply to Re: Determining if a word is really an abbreviation by andyf
in thread Determining if a word is really an abbreviation by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.