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Three-letter acronym

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This article is about the three-letter acronym TLA. For other uses see TLA (disambiguation).

The three-letter acronym, or TLA, is the most popular type of abbreviation in technical terminology, and is also very common in general language.

Abbreviations:

Three-letter acronym is most often abbreviated TLA (which is itself in fact not a TLA but a TLI - a three-letter initialism).

Since TLA could also stand for two-letter abbreviation, it is ambiguous. The abbreviation 3LA is less ambiguous, but much less frequently used. (3LA is probably a TLA, see Description below.)

Questionable construction:

While three-letter acronym is the older and more frequently used term, some have argued that most TLAs are not really acronyms at all, and advocate using the term three-letter abbreviation instead. Three-letter abbreviation happens to share the same abbreviation: TLA.

Three-letter abbreviation encompasses a stricter definition of three-letter acronym and a possibly distinct type, three-letter initialism, a term that is now seen occasionally (e.g., see RDO). The definition of acronym may be splitting. (See Acronym and initialism and List of acronyms and initialisms.) If one pronounces an abbreviation as a word, then it can be an acronym (like FAQ) or a contraction (like abs). If one recites the letters of the abbreviation (like PDQ), then it is probably an initialism. If one says something other than what is obvious (sees "etc.", but says "Et Cetera"), then it is probably an ordinary abbreviation.

Synonyms:

The term trigram may be inclusive of TLAs.

Contents

Overview & Concept

TLA is a three-letter abbreviation itself; the term was almost certainly coined with a certain degree of self-referential humor in mind. A few TLAs are in fact recursive acronyms -- in which one of the letters is the abbreviation for the TLA itself. Well-known examples include:

Background

TLAs became common in the United States during the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (who is frequently referred to as FDR). Terms from this period included NRA for National Recovery Administration, CCC for the Civilian Conservation Corps, and TVA for the Tennessee Valley Authority. Detractors of President Roosevelt's policies called the new agencies "alphabet soup."

According to [acronyms.com], TLA was coined by Jeff Kelley (John F. Kelley, Ph.D., CPE) who worked at the time at IBM, a company whose name itself was a TLA. Kelley reports vaguely recalling that the date on which he coined the term was around 1985. At least two references to the term from 1982 can be found on the Google Groups Usenet archive as well, one from net.games.frp [link] and one from a post to net.jokes entitled [The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Net]. The user manual for the Sinclair ZX81 personal computer, released in 1981, contains the sentence, "As you can see, everything has a three letter abbreviation (TLA),"[link] referring to the abbreviations of the internal parts.

Description

Using only upper-case letters and ignoring diacritics, there are 26³ = 17,576 possible three-letter abbreviations, and probably most of them are already used in some context. If one or two numbers are included (e.g. 4GL, Y2K), the total swells to 45,656. If special characters (eg. R&R) or case-sensitivity (eg. WfW) are allowed, many more TLAs can be created, but these might more properly be called TCAs (Three Character Abbreviations).

Many TLAs have more than one meaning: TLA itself is also a TLA for the Theater of the Living Arts among other things. There are many TLAs with more than 10 meanings (for example, SDI has at least 36 meanings in the English language). Furthermore, many abbreviations have more than one expansion with the same meaning. For example, GCC first represented GNU C Compiler, but was later changed to mean GNU Compiler Collection (see also backronym).

In the MS-DOS operating system for personal computers, because only three-letter file extensions (usually denoting the file type) were allowed, many longer abbreviations were shortened to three letters (for example JPEG to JPG, HTML to HTM), and many of these are still used. DOS itself is a TLA for Disk Operating System, although Microsoft has since changed its definition of the term to Desktop Operating System.

Many abbreviations, some of them TLAs, come from the shortened names of Usenet groups. For example, PRA for pl.rec.anime, or AFU for alt.folklore.urban.

Sometimes the prefix "ex-" is represented by an "X" in the abbreviation, as in "XML" for "Extensible Markup Language".

Usage

TLAs are typically pronounced with names of the letters (e.g., Tee Ell Ay) and written in all capital letters. Some are pronounced as words (e.g., RAM), also known as anacronyms, and others are used both ways (e.g., FAQ). TLAs are pluralized by adding s (as in TLAs). The possessive is formed by adding apostrophe and s (as in IBM's). TLAs are particularly prone to RAS syndrome ("Redundant Acronym Syndrome syndrome"), in which one of the abbreviated words (usually the last) is added alongside the abbreviation itself - as in "ATM machine", "PIN number", and "HIV virus". Purists recommend avoiding RAS syndrome, especially in formal writing such as technical writing.

Common categories of TLAs

A significant number of TLAs come from various codes:

List of all possible TLAs

There are 17,576 possible TLAs (26 × 26 × 26), all of which are referenced in the following lists:

Other lists of TLAs

Trivia

See also

External links

 

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