69 Fun Facts About Acronym

What does the 'A' in NASA stand for?

National Aeronautics and Space Administration; it runs ten field centres from its Washington headquarters.

'Scuba' began as an acronym for what?

Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus was coined in 1952 by Christian Lambertsen, a US Army doctor who developed a diving rebreather; 'scuba' has since become an ordinary lowercase word.

The word 'laser' stands for light amplification by stimulated emission of what?

Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation; Theodore Maiman built the first working laser, a ruby laser, at Hughes Research Laboratories in May 1960.

Which organisation coined the term RADAR in 1940?

Radio detection and ranging; like scuba it has since become a plain lowercase noun.

What does the 'so' in 'sonar' stand for?

Sound navigation and ranging; passive sonar listens, active sonar pings.

UNICEF originally stood for the United Nations International Children's what?

Founded in December 1946 as the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund for post-war relief, it became the United Nations Children's Fund in 1953 but kept the UNICEF initials.

What does the 'S' in UNESCO stand for?

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, founded in London in November 1945 and headquartered in Paris.

OPEC was founded in 1960 in which city?

OPEC was founded at the Baghdad Conference of 10–14 September 1960 by Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela; its headquarters moved from Geneva to Vienna in 1965.

GIF stands for Graphics Interchange what?

CompuServe's Steve Wilhite released it in June 1987; he insisted it be pronounced with a soft g.

The letters JPEG come from the name of what?

The Joint Photographic Experts Group; the format is a lossy compression method.

What does the 'R' in RAM stand for?

RAM stands for random-access memory: any storage location can be read or written directly in roughly equal time, unlike tape, which must be wound to the spot.

What does the 'M' in HTML stand for?

Hypertext Markup Language defines the content and structure of web pages.

URL stands for Uniform Resource what?

Uniform Resource Locator, the web-address scheme devised by Tim Berners-Lee and formally specified in RFC 1738 in December 1994.

Who came up with the name Wi-Fi?

The Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance hired the brand consultancy Interbrand in 1999, which offered ten names; Wi-Fi beat 'IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence', and 'wireless fidelity' was a later tagline.

CAPTCHA is a contrived acronym for a Completely Automated Public what?

Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, coined in 2003 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper and John Langford at Carnegie Mellon.

ZIP in 'ZIP Code' stands for what?

Zone Improvement Plan; the US Post Office introduced five-digit ZIP Codes on 1 July 1963, with a name chosen to suggest mail zipping along faster.

The name Taser loosely honours which fictional boy inventor from a 1911 novel?

Jack Cover named his 1974 stun gun after Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle (1911), inserting an A for 'Thomas A. Swift'; the boy-inventor series had begun in 1910.

CARE, of CARE Package fame, originally stood for the Cooperative for American Remittances to where?

Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe was formed in 1945 to ship food parcels to a war-torn continent; the first CARE Packages landed at Le Havre in May 1946.

SIM in SIM card stands for what?

Subscriber Identity Module; the card holds the IMSI (international mobile subscriber identity) and a secret key that authenticate the phone on the network, a design introduced with GSM in 1991.

What does LED stand for?

Light-emitting diode: a semiconductor junction in which electrons recombine with holes and release photons; Nick Holonyak built the first visible-light LED at General Electric in 1962.

Why is the phrase 'PIN number' considered redundant?

Personal identification number; the N is 'number', so 'ATM machine' commits the same sin.

IKEA is an acronym built from Ingvar Kamprad's initials plus what?

Elmtaryd and Agunnaryd; he founded the company at 17 in 1943 as a mail-order business.

The two Ms in M&M's stand for Forrest Mars and whom?

Bruce Murrie, son of Hershey president William Murrie, took a 20% stake and secured the chocolate supply; the candy launched in 1941.

What did 3M originally stand for?

Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company was founded at Two Harbors, Minnesota, in 1902 to mine corundum; the company made 3M its official name in 2002.

BMW began in 1916 as a maker of what?

BMW started out building aircraft engines — its 1917 IIIa powered the Fokker D.VII — and made no car until the 1928 Dixi; its first motorcycle, the R32, came in 1923.

GEICO stands for what?

Government Employees Insurance Company was founded in 1936 by Leo and Lillian Goodwin to insure federal workers and military officers; Berkshire Hathaway bought it outright in 1996.

What prize did Ken Daigneau win for naming Spam in Hormel's 1937 contest?

Ken Daigneau, an actor and brother of a Hormel vice-president, won $100 for the name Spam in 1937; Hormel has said the name's meaning is known only to a few former executives.

The name Yahoo was later reinterpreted as an acronym for what?

Yang and Filo said Yahoo stood for 'Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle', an acronym invented after the fact for a site that began in 1994 as 'Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web'.

The name Lego comes from a Danish phrase meaning what?

Lego contracts the Danish 'leg godt', 'play well'; Ole Kirk Christiansen adopted the name in 1934, fifteen years before his first plastic bricks.

What does MASH stand for in M*A*S*H?

Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, the US Army field units created in 1945 and made famous in Korea; Robert Altman's 1970 film and the 1972–83 TV series follow the fictional 4077th.

SWAT stands for Special Weapons and what?

Special Weapons and Tactics; the LAPD's unit, formed in 1967, popularised the term, and Daryl Gates wrote that his original proposal was 'Special Weapons Attack Team'.

NASCAR is the National Association for what?

National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing was founded by Bill France Sr. at Daytona Beach in February 1948; its first Strictly Stock race ran at Charlotte in June 1949.

FIFA's initials come from a name in which language?

Fédération Internationale de Football Association, founded in 1904 by seven European associations.

ESPN was an initialism of what original name?

Entertainment and Sports Programming Network launched on 7 September 1979 from Bristol, Connecticut; the channel dropped the full name and became simply ESPN in 1985.

HBO stands for what?

Home Box Office launched on 8 November 1972 as a Sterling Manhattan Cable service; its first night carried an NHL game from Madison Square Garden.

AT&T abbreviates the name of which company?

American Telephone and Telegraph Company was incorporated in 1885 as the long-distance subsidiary of Bell Telephone and took over its parent in 1899.

IBM stands for International what Machines?

International Business Machines; the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company took the IBM name in February 1924 under Thomas J. Watson Sr.

DVD is commonly expanded as Digital Video Disc or Digital what Disc?

'Digital Versatile Disc' was adopted by the format's backers to reflect data as well as video uses; the first players went on sale in Japan on 1 November 1996.

What does the 'S' in USB stand for?

Universal Serial Bus, developed by the USB Implementers Forum.

Which branch of the U.S. military operates GPS?

The Space Force took over GPS from the Air Force after its creation in December 2019; the constellation is flown from Schriever Space Force Base, Colorado.

DNA is short for what?

Deoxyribonucleic acid, named for its deoxyribose sugar; two polynucleotide chains coil into the double helix that Watson and Crick described in 1953.

What do the letters and number in COVID-19 stand for?

Coronavirus disease 2019, the name the WHO announced on 11 February 2020; the virus itself is SARS-CoV-2.

RSVP is derived from a phrase in which language?

Répondez s'il vous plaît, literally 'respond if it pleases you'.

What does 'a.m.' stand for?

Ante meridiem is Latin for 'before midday'; p.m. is post meridiem, 'after midday'.

Where was LOL first used almost exclusively before spreading?

LOL spread through Usenet newsgroups in the 1980s and early 1990s before reaching chat rooms and texting; the Oxford English Dictionary added it in 2011.

YOLO became popular slang in 2012 after which rapper's single 'The Motto'?

Drake's 2011 single 'The Motto', from the album Take Care, with its line 'You only live once, that's the motto... YOLO', turned the acronym into a 2012 catchphrase.

What does TL;DR stand for?

Too long; didn't read, recorded since about 2002 as a dismissal of verbose posts and later as a label for a summary; Merriam-Webster added it in 2018.

SNAFU is an acronym for 'Situation normal: all...' what?

Fouled up is the polite version; the US Army slang of the early 1940s used a blunter F-word, and SNAFU was in print by 1941.

Why was SOS chosen as the distress signal?

Three dots, three dashes, three dots, sent with no pauses; the 'save our souls' reading is a backronym.

Adidas is named after founder Adolf 'Adi' Dassler, but is falsely believed to stand for what?

'All Day I Dream About Sport' is a folk expansion invented long after the fact; Adi Dassler registered Adidas in August 1949, having started out making shoes in his mother's wash-kitchen in Herzogenaurach in 1924.

'Wiki' is sometimes said to mean 'what I know is', but it really derives from what?

Wiki-wiki; the distress call 'pan-pan' is likewise from the French panne, breakdown, not 'possible assistance needed'.

Which term describes an ordinary word that people later reinterpret as an acronym?

Backronym blends 'back' and 'acronym'; the word won a Washington Post neologism contest in 1983.

Alcoa is an acronym for what?

Aluminum Company of America, the name the Pittsburgh Reduction Company (founded 1888 to exploit Charles Martin Hall's smelting process) adopted in 1907; Alcoa became the official name in 1999.

Nabisco is a shortening of what?

National Biscuit Company was formed in 1898 by merging the American, New York and United biscuit companies; it adopted the Nabisco name in 1971 and is part of Mondelēz International.

Haribo is a syllabic abbreviation of what?

Hans Riegel founded the company in Bonn in 1920 and built the name from the first two letters of each word; his dancing-bear gummies followed in 1922.

Aflac stands for what?

American Family Life Assurance Company of Columbus was founded in Georgia in 1955 by the Amos brothers; the Aflac duck arrived in 2000.

What does 'Humvee' abbreviate?

High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, or HMMWV; AM General began deliveries to the US Army in 1985, and the truck largely replaced the jeep.

The word 'bit' in computing is a portmanteau of what?

Binary digit; John Tukey coined the contraction in 1947 and Claude Shannon put it in print in 1948.

'Modem' is a contraction of what?

Modulator-demodulator: it modulates digital data onto an analogue carrier for telephone or radio lines and demodulates the reply; Bell's 1958 Dataphone was an early commercial model.

SMART goals are specific, measurable, assignable, realistic and what?

Time-bound, or 'time-related' in George Doran's original: he set out the SMART mnemonic in a November 1981 Management Review article.

The airline name Qantas is an acronym of Queensland And Northern Territory Aerial what?

Queensland And Northern Territory Aerial Services was registered at Winton, Queensland, on 16 November 1920 by Hudson Fysh, Paul McGinness and Fergus McMaster.

FIAT stands for Fabbrica Italiana Automobili and which city?

Giovanni Agnelli and partners founded the Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino — the Italian Automobile Factory of Turin — on 11 July 1899; its first car was the 3½ HP.

NASDAQ is an acronym for the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated what?

National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations opened on 8 February 1971 as the world's first electronic stock market.

The word 'canola' combines 'ola' for oil with 'can', short for what?

It began as a trademark of the Rapeseed Association of Canada and now denotes low-erucic-acid rapeseed oil.

AMBER in 'AMBER Alert' is officially a backronym for America's Missing: Broadcast Emergency what?

America's Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response is a retrofitted expansion; the system was named for Amber Hagerman, a nine-year-old abducted and murdered in Arlington, Texas, in January 1996.

'Gestapo' is a syllabic abbreviation of Geheime Staatspolizei, meaning what?

Geheime Staatspolizei is 'Secret State Police'; Hermann Göring created it in Prussia in April 1933, and Heinrich Himmler took control in 1934.

In Doctor Who, TARDIS stands for Time And Relative Dimension In what?

Time And Relative Dimension In Space — Susan Foreman claims to have coined the name in the first episode, 'An Unearthly Child', broadcast on 23 November 1963.

The company name Sega is an abbreviation of what?

Service Games, a firm that supplied coin-operated machines to US military bases from the 1940s; the contracted Sega name first appeared in 1954 on a slot machine called the Diamond Star.

The name Interpol, adopted in 1956, was derived from what?

The International Criminal Police Commission had used the address since 1946; its official acronyms remain OIPC in French and ICPO in English.