in reply to Determining if a word is really an abbreviation

Those are acronyms, not abbreviations. And, acronyms tend to be all uppercase and also tend to not be words (though there are some very obvious exceptions, especially with acronyms that are chosen to be words.)

Good luck.

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  • Comment on Re: Determining if a word is really an abbreviation

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Re^2: Determining if a word is really an abbreviation
by halley (Prior) on Jun 15, 2004 at 19:51 UTC
    Um, you have that backwards. An acronym can be pronounced and is accepted as a word: RADAR, LIDAR, SONAR, SCUBA, PATRIOT, and so on. IBM is merely an abbreviation (or initialism) because you say "eye bee em."

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    [ e d @ h a l l e y . c c ]

[reply]

      The dictionary definition (external link) of "abbreviate" means simply "to make shorter". From that definition, I would say that an acronym is a specific type of abbreviation.

      The dictionary defintion (another external link) of "acronym" could be interpreted to mean what you say, but I don't think it has to be. The defintion given above says nothing about being able to pronounce the series of letters, just that it is a word formed by the first letters of the word series (or parts of the word series), which would include "IBM".

      I typicaly think of an abbreviation as a shortening of a single word, such as "Inc."

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[reply]
      I'm backing Halley on this one, and strongly disagreeing with hardburn and dragonchild.
[reply]
        Well, you're all wrong. An acronym is an abbreviation (synonyms). Its just concidence that in practice most words which get called "acronyms" are words formed from the initial letters of a multi-word name. It doesn't stop them from being abbrev.
[reply]

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