119 Fun Facts About Acronym

What does the first 'A' in NASA stand for?

Aeronautics: NASA was built in 1958 on NACA, a federal aeronautics research agency founded in 1915, whose laboratories and staff it took over.

'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: physicist Gordon Gould coined 'laser' in a 1957 notebook, then fought for thirty years to win the patents on it.

The acronym RADAR stands for radio what and ranging?

Detection: 'radio detection and ranging' was coined in the United States around 1940; like scuba, the acronym has since shed its capitals and become an ordinary word.

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

Sound navigation and ranging: the word was coined in the US in the 1940s as a partner for 'radar', while Britain's navy called its own echo-locating gear ASDIC.

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?

Scientific is the S; the agency's 1945 charter opens with the idea that 'since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed'.

What does the 'P' in OPEC stand for?

Petroleum: the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries was set up at a 1960 conference in Baghdad by five oil states after the big oil companies cut the prices they paid without consulting them.

GIF stands for Graphics Interchange what?

Graphics Interchange Format came from a CompuServe team led by Steve Wilhite in 1987; collecting a Webby award in 2013, he used an animated GIF to insist it is pronounced 'jif'.

The letters JPEG come from the name of what?

A committee of experts: the Joint Photographic Experts Group, set up in 1986, is 'joint' because two international standards bodies pooled their image specialists to write the 1992 photo standard.

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?

Markup, as in Hypertext Markup Language, comes from publishing, where editors 'marked up' manuscripts with instructions for the typesetter; HTML's tags give a web browser the same kind of instructions.

URL stands for Uniform Resource what?

Uniform Resource Locator is the web-address scheme Tim Berners-Lee helped define in 1994; he later admitted the two slashes after 'http:' were unnecessary and apologised for them.

Who came up with the name Wi-Fi?

The brand consultancy Interbrand was hired by the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance, which wanted something catchier than 'IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence'; a founding member says 'wireless fidelity' was only a tagline added later.

CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public what?

Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart: the Carnegie Mellon researchers who coined it turned Alan Turing's test around, so that a computer, not a person, judges who is human.

ZIP in 'ZIP Code' stands for what?

Zone Improvement Plan: the US Post Office introduced the codes in 1963 and, to win over a reluctant public, promoted them with Mr. ZIP, a cartoon mail carrier who promised faster delivery.

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

Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle (1911) was a childhood favourite of inventor Jack Cover, who slipped an A into the initials because, he said, his staff got tired of answering the phone 'T.S.E.R.'

CARE, founded in 1945 to send food parcels abroad, originally stood for the Cooperative for American Remittances to where?

Europe: the first CARE Packages, landed at Le Havre in May 1946, were surplus US Army rations stockpiled for the invasion of Japan; as the aid spread to other continents, the E was changed to 'Everywhere'.

SIM in SIM card stands for what?

Subscriber Identity Module: the chip, not the handset, holds the identity and secret key that the network checks, which is why moving a SIM into another phone takes your number with it.

What does LED stand for?

Light-emitting diode: red and green LEDs were around for decades, but white LED lamps had to wait for a bright blue one, which arrived in the early 1990s and won its three inventors the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics.

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?

His family farm and hometown: Elmtaryd and Agunnaryd, in Småland. Kamprad was 17 when he registered IKEA in 1943, and it first sold pens, watches and nylon stockings by mail; furniture came five years later.

The second M in M&M's stands for Bruce Murrie, whose father was president of which chocolate company?

Hershey supplied the chocolate: Forrest Mars gave Bruce Murrie a 20 percent stake in 1941 to secure supplies as wartime rationing loomed, then bought him out once the war was over.

What did 3M originally stand for?

Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing was founded at Two Harbors in 1902 to mine corundum for grinding wheels, but the rock proved to be low-grade anorthosite, so the company turned to making sandpaper instead.

The 'B' in BMW refers to which German state?

Bavaria: BMW is Bayerische Motoren Werke, a Munich firm that began with aircraft engines. When the post-war peace treaty barred Germany from building them, it moved on to motorcycles in 1923 and into cars in 1928.

GEICO stands for what?

Government Employees Insurance Company was founded in 1936 by Leo and Lillian Goodwin, whose plan was to sell car insurance directly to carefully chosen customers, starting with federal workers; Lillian kept the books and set the rates.

Spam's name is popularly read as a contraction of which two words?

Spiced ham is the popular reading, though Hormel says the real meaning is known only to a small circle of former executives; Ken Daigneau, an executive's brother, won the contest to name it before its 1937 launch.

Yahoo's own company history called its name an acronym for what?

Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle was the official line, but Jerry Yang and David Filo insisted they chose Yahoo because they liked its meaning: 'rude, unsophisticated, uncouth'.

The name Lego comes from a Danish phrase meaning what?

Play well is 'leg godt' in Danish; carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen coined the name in the mid-1930s for his wooden toys, more than a decade before the company made its first plastic bricks.

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

Mobile Army Surgical Hospital units worked close to the front in Korea so the wounded reached a surgeon quickly; the TV series about one, the fictional 4077th, ran eleven seasons, over three times as long as the war.

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?

Stock Car Auto Racing: 'stock' meant ordinary production cars, the kind Prohibition-era moonshine runners had tuned to outrun the law; Bill France Sr. organised the sport as NASCAR at Daytona Beach in 1948.

Which sport's name began as slang clipped from the word 'Association'?

Soccer is no Americanism: it began as 1880s English university slang, clipped from the 'Assoc.' in Association football; the same word is the A in FIFA.

ESPN was an initialism of what original name?

Entertainment and Sports Programming Network was dreamed up in 1978 by Bill Rasmussen, just fired by hockey's New England Whalers; it launched from Bristol, Connecticut, a year later and dropped the long name in 1985.

HBO stands for what?

Home Box Office was named to suggest a box-office ticket to uncut films at home; in 1975 it became the first American network to send its programmes out by satellite, which turned a regional service into a national one.

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: when Thomas J. Watson Sr. swapped the clumsy name Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company for it in 1924, the firm's 'business machines' were punched-card tabulators, time clocks, scales and meat slicers.

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

Versatile was put forward by some of the disc's makers in 1995, after computer companies complained that 'video' left out their uses; officially, the industry agreed, DVD is simply three letters.

What does the 'S' in USB stand for?

Serial means the data travels one bit after another; introduced in 1996, the Universal Serial Bus gave PCs a single kind of plug in place of their separate serial, parallel, mouse and keyboard ports.

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

The Space Force has run the Global Positioning System since it was carved out of the Air Force in 2019; built for the military, GPS was promised to civilian aircraft after a strayed Korean airliner was shot down in 1983.

DNA is short for what?

Deoxyribonucleic acid is named for its sugar, deoxyribose, which is ribose with one oxygen atom removed; Watson and Crick showed in 1953 that its two strands wind into a double helix.

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

Coronavirus disease 2019 was named by the WHO in February 2020 under rules that barred any reference to a place, an animal or a group of people, so that the name could not stigmatise anyone.

RSVP is derived from a phrase in which language?

French: RSVP is 'répondez s'il vous plaît', literally 'respond, if it pleases you', which is why 'please RSVP' says please twice.

In AM and PM, the M is the Latin 'meridiem', meaning what?

Midday: AM is ante meridiem, 'before midday', and PM is post meridiem, 'after midday', so noon itself is strictly neither; the US standards agency NIST calls 12 AM and 12 PM ambiguous and says not to use them.

Which British prime minister signed texts 'LOL' in the belief that it meant 'lots of love'?

David Cameron ended texts to newspaper executive Rebekah Brooks with LOL until she told him it meant 'laugh out loud', as she testified to the Leveson Inquiry into press standards in 2012.

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

Drake's 'The Motto', released in late 2011, turned YOLO into the catchphrase of 2012; the saying itself was old enough to have been the title of a 1937 Fritz Lang film, You Only Live Once.

What does TL;DR stand for?

Too long; didn't read began around 2002 as a curt dismissal of a wordy post and has since turned into a helpful label for the short summary at the top of a long one.

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

Fouled up is the polite version: the American servicemen who coined SNAFU around 1941 used a blunter F-word, voicing the ordinary soldier's weary acceptance of wartime chaos and bungling superiors.

Why was SOS chosen as the distress signal?

Its Morse code is simple and unmistakable: three dots, three dashes, three dots, run together without a pause. Germany adopted it in 1905 and the letters stood for nothing; 'Save Our Souls' was read into them later.

Adidas is falsely believed to stand for what?

'All Day I Dream About Sport' is a myth: the name simply joins founder Adi Dassler's nickname to his surname, registered in 1949 after his split from his brother Rudolf, who set up the rival Puma in the same town.

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

A Hawaiian phrase for 'fast' gave the name: Ward Cunningham called his 1995 site WikiWikiWeb after an airport agent in Honolulu told him to take the 'wiki wiki' bus, the quick shuttle between terminals.

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

Backronym blends 'back' and 'acronym' and first appeared among readers' entries in a 1983 Washington Post word contest; a classic case is the newborn Apgar score, named after Dr Virginia Apgar and spelled out as a checklist only later.

Alcoa is an acronym for what?

Aluminum Company of America began in 1888 as the Pittsburgh Reduction Company, formed to use Charles Martin Hall's new smelting process, which turned aluminum from a metal as costly as silver into an everyday one.

Nabisco is a shortening of what?

National Biscuit Company was formed in 1898 by a merger of rival bakeries; its Uneeda Biscuit came sealed in a moisture-proof packet at a time when crackers were sold loose, and often stale, from open barrels.

Haribo is a syllabic abbreviation of what?

Hans Riegel started Haribo in 1920 in a small kitchen in Bonn with little more than a sack of sugar, a marble slab and a copper pot; his wife Gertrud, the first employee, delivered the sweets by bicycle.

Aflac stands for what?

American Family Life Assurance Company of Columbus, Georgia, found its biggest market abroad: by 2010 its chief executive could say that Aflac insured one in four Japanese households, with more policies than any other insurer there.

What does 'Humvee' abbreviate?

High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, HMMWV for short, was nicknamed the Humvee; it took over from the jeep in the 1980s, and Arnold Schwarzenegger pushed its maker to sell a civilian version, the Hummer, in 1992.

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

Binary digit was squeezed into 'bit' by statistician John Tukey at Bell Labs; Claude Shannon borrowed it for his 1948 paper on communication, where the bit became the unit for measuring information.

'Modem' is a contraction of what?

Modulator-demodulator: telephone lines were built to carry the human voice, so a modem turns a computer's bits into voice-like tones for the journey and turns the incoming tones back into bits.

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

Time-bound, or 'time-related' as George Doran put it when he introduced SMART in a 1981 management article; the list has been reworded over the years, with other words swapped in for his A and R.

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

Queensland And Northern Territory Aerial Services was registered in 1920 by two former wartime airmen and a grazier; it spent its first two years selling joyrides and charter flights in the outback before running a scheduled route.

FIAT stands for Fabbrica Italiana Automobili and which city?

Torino is Italian for Turin, where Giovanni Agnelli and his partners founded Fiat in 1899; at its Lingotto factory there, cars were assembled floor by floor on the way up and then test-driven on a track on the roof.

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

Quotations is the clue to what it first was: when Nasdaq opened in 1971 it only displayed dealers' prices on screens, and the trades themselves were still agreed by telephone.

The 'can' in the name of canola oil is short for what?

Canada: plant breeders there developed an edible, low-acid rapeseed in the 1970s, and the industry coined 'canola' to set it apart from ordinary rapeseed; the ending is usually read as 'oil'.

AMBER in 'AMBER Alert' officially stands 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 a German name meaning what?

Secret State Police translates Geheime Staatspolizei, the force Hermann Göring formed from Prussia's political police in 1933; its arrests could not be challenged in any court, which put it in effect above the law.

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

Time And Relative Dimension In Space: Susan says in the first episode that she made the name up from the initials; in 1965's The Time Meddler it became 'Dimensions', plural, and the show has used both forms.

Sega, which began by supplying coin-operated games to US military bases, is a contraction of which earlier company name?

Service Games grew out of a firm Americans started in Hawaii in 1940 to supply military bases; it moved into Japan in the early 1950s and squeezed its name down to Sega.

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

The organisation's telegraphic address was 'INTERPOL', the one-word name chosen in 1946 for cables sent to the International Criminal Police Commission; a decade later the handy nickname went into the official title.

The title Mrs. contains an 'r' because it began as a contraction of which older honorific?

Mistress was the feminine of Mister or Master and once applied to married and unmarried upper-class women alike, which is why Mrs. keeps an 'r' that nobody pronounces.

Which country's name was coined in 1933 as an acronym drawing on Punjab, Kashmir and Sindh?

Pakistan first appeared in print as 'Pakstan' in activist Choudhry Rahmat Ali's pamphlet Now or Never, which took letters from Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Sindh and Baluchistan.

Which word was cut from the original name of the hospital MRI scan to avoid negative associations?

Nuclear described the atomic nuclei that the scanner's magnet acts on, yet an MRI involves no X-rays; the original name NMRI carried unwelcome associations, so the N was cut.

Often taken as 'roast beef', which sandwich chain's name really sounds out the initials of the Raffel brothers?

Arby's is simply R and B said aloud: Forrest and Leroy Raffel wanted to call their 1964 Ohio restaurant Big Tex, but an Akron firm already had that name.

Which word for 'luxurious' is wrongly said to be an acronym from cabin bookings on British liners to India?

Posh supposedly stood for 'port out, starboard home', the breezier cabins each way; in fact the word was never an acronym and its true origin is unknown.

Often misread as 'After Death', the calendar label AD actually abbreviates which Medieval Latin phrase?

Anno Domini means 'in the year of the Lord'; the monk Dionysius Exiguus devised the count in 525, and 'After Death' would leave the years Jesus was alive with no label at all.

Which candy's name is a shortened form of the German word for peppermint?

Pez, launched in Vienna in 1927, shortens 'Pfefferminz'; its first dispensers were shaped like cigarette lighters and sold adult breath mints as an alternative to tobacco.

What does the 'T' stand for in ATM, the cash machine first installed at a London Barclays in 1967?

Teller is the old word for a bank clerk who counts out cash; the first machine, in Enfield, north London, was tried out for the cameras by actor Reg Varney.

What does the 'Q' stand for in IQ, the score that intelligence tests produce?

Quotient is the result of a division: early scores divided mental age by actual age, and psychologist William Stern's 1912 German term 'Intelligenzquotient' gave the abbreviation IQ.

First recognised by American health officials in 1981, the condition AIDS takes its 'A' from which word?

Acquired means picked up after birth rather than inherited; the name was adopted at a July 1982 meeting to replace GRID, a label that wrongly tied the illness to gay men alone.

On a sunscreen bottle the rating SPF measures protection against sunburn, so what does the 'F' stand for?

Factor completes 'sun protection factor', introduced in 1974 by Austrian chemist Franz Greiter, whose brand Piz Buin is named after the mountain where he allegedly got sunburnt.

What does the 'M' stand for in GMT, the clock time measured from an observatory in London?

Mean is the arithmetic average: the Sun can pass over Greenwich up to 16 minutes before or after noon, so the clock's noon is the yearly average of that moment.

What does the 'F' stand for in FM, the broadcast system Edwin Armstrong invented to cut out static?

Frequency is what an FM signal varies, where AM varies strength: in a 1940 demo beside a million-volt arc, AM gave a roar of static while FM played music clearly.

The acronym UFO was coined by an American military captain to replace which more colourful popular phrase?

Flying saucer was misleading, wrote Captain Edward Ruppelt, when witnesses were describing objects of every conceivable shape, so he chose a more general, if less colourful, name.

The 'D' in DC Comics stands for which word, from the series where Batman made his debut?

Detective Comics, first published in 1937, introduced Batman in issue 27, which means the publisher's modern name technically spells out 'Detective Comics Comics'.

The abbreviation 'i.e.', often confused with 'e.g.', shortens a Latin phrase meaning what in English?

That is, the meaning of the Latin 'id est', introduces a restatement of what was just said, whereas e.g. shortens 'exempli gratia' and introduces a sample; swapping them changes the claim.

Which everyday unit is abbreviated using two letters from the Latin word 'libra', meaning scales?

Pound gets its name from the second word of the Latin phrase 'libra pondo' and its symbol lb from the first, which is why the spelling and the abbreviation share no letters.

Which US president's nickname 'Old Kinderhook' helped spread the word OK during his 1840 re-election campaign?

Martin Van Buren came from Kinderhook, New York, so his supporters adopted OK, which had begun a year earlier in a Boston newspaper as a joke abbreviation of the misspelling 'oll korrect'.

Because NATO has a second official language with a different word order, which four letters also name the alliance?

OTAN puts the word 'Organisation' first, as the alliance's second official language requires; by coincidence the four letters are exactly NATO spelled backwards.

Even a PhD in chemistry names another subject: its 'Ph' is short for the Latin word for what?

Philosophy here keeps its original Greek sense, 'love of wisdom', covering all learning, which is why the same degree title goes to chemists, historians and economists alike.

The job-hunter's CV is short for 'curriculum vitae', a Latin phrase meaning what?

Course of life is the literal Latin; in North America the same document is usually called a résumé, and 'CV' is kept for the much longer academic version.

Which broadcaster's final initial stood for 'Company' until a charter from the Crown changed the word in 1927?

BBC began in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, owned by a consortium of wireless-set makers who were soon losing money on it; a Crown-chartered public body took over on 1 January 1927.

In the name of Hollywood studio MGM, formed by a 1924 merger, what does the first 'M' stand for?

Metro Pictures came first: theatre magnate Marcus Loew bought it to feed his cinemas, then merged it with Goldwyn Pictures and Louis B. Mayer Pictures, which supplied the other M.

REM sleep is the stage when most vivid dreaming happens; what does the 'E' in REM stand for?

Eye movements named the stage in 1953, when Nathaniel Kleitman and his student Eugene Aserinsky linked the darting to dreams; the rest of the body is almost completely paralysed.

In the lifesaving technique CPR, the 'P' is short for a word referring to which part of the body?

Lungs are what 'pulmonary' refers to, with 'cardio' covering the heart; even so, untrained rescuers are advised to skip the rescue breaths and give chest compressions only.

In the seasoning MSG, first extracted from seaweed broth by a Japanese chemist, the 'G' stands for what?

Glutamate is what Kikunae Ikeda isolated in 1908 while chasing the savoury taste of kombu broth; he named that taste umami and patented his seasoning soon after.

The 1980s label 'yuppie' was built from the initials of the phrase 'young urban' what?

Professional completes it; first attested in 1980 as a fairly neutral demographic label, the word had turned into an insult later in the decade as a backlash over gentrification grew.

The word 'gulag' began as a Soviet agency's acronym, the Main Directorate of Correctional Labour what?

Camps is the 'lag' in gulag, from the Russian 'lagerey'; the bureaucratic acronym became known worldwide after Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn published The Gulag Archipelago in 1973.

New York's SoHo, a name coined by an urban planner in 1962, is short for 'South of' which street?

Houston Street gave the district its label when planner Chester Rapkin wrote a report on the industrial area south of it; the name also nods to the much older Soho in London's West End.

The X in the abbreviation Xmas is really which Greek letter, the first in the Greek spelling of 'Christ'?

Chi looks like a Latin X, and scribes were using it as shorthand for 'Christ' as early as 1100, so Xmas was never an attempt to take the religion out of the holiday.

Mathematicians end a proof with QED, short for a Latin phrase meaning 'which was to be' what?

Demonstrated translates 'demonstrandum'; the Latin itself renders a Greek sign-off that Euclid and Archimedes placed at the end of their own proofs.

The initials SPQR, found on the Italian capital's coat of arms, name the Senate and which other group?

The people, 'populus' in Latin, share the motto with the Senate: the phrase was the signature of the ancient republic, and the modern city's coat of arms carries the same four letters.

The Soviet Union's Cyrillic initials CCCP become which letters when transliterated into the Latin alphabet?

SSSR is the true reading, because Cyrillic С sounds like S and Р like R: the full name ran Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, a word-for-word match for the English initials.

The word Anzac, shared by a biscuit and a day of remembrance, began as the acronym of which kind of army unit?

Corps is the final C: the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps was formed in Egypt in December 1914 and disbanded in 1916, but its acronym became a lasting name for the soldiers themselves.

The Walt Disney World park name Epcot began as an acronym for an 'Experimental Prototype' what?

Community of Tomorrow was meant literally: Walt Disney planned a working town of 20,000 residents as a living laboratory, but after his death the company built a theme park instead.

Which two Asian cities are named in the full title behind the banking giant HSBC, founded in 1865?

Hong Kong and Shanghai both had branches within the bank's first year; the corporate title, the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, spells the first city as a single word.

The astronomers' word 'quasar' is a contraction of 'quasi-stellar' what, after how the objects were first found?

Radio source was the original label because the objects turned up in 1950s surveys as star-like points of unknown origin; a 1964 article in Physics Today shortened the clumsy phrase to a single word.

The supermarket name Tesco joins founder Jack Cohen's surname to the initials of his supplier of which product?

Tea came from Thomas Edward Stockwell, whose initials T.E.S. were joined to the first two letters of Cohen on new labels in 1924, years before he opened an actual Tesco shop.

On a cognac label, the grade VSOP is short for the English words 'Very Superior Old' what?

Pale completes the grade, which requires the youngest brandy in the blend to spend at least four years in cask; the wording is English because the British were so involved in the 18th-century trade.

SMERSH, the Soviet agency in the early James Bond novels, took its name from a phrase meaning 'death to' whom?

Spies were the target named by Joseph Stalin himself, who rejected a draft title aimed only at German agents; the real wartime agency was announced in 1943 and dissolved in 1946.

The 'K' in the Dutch airline KLM stands for 'Koninklijke', a title held since its founding in 1919, meaning what?

Royal was an unusual honour for an airline that did not yet exist: Queen Wilhelmina granted the title in September 1919, a month before KLM was founded, which is why its logo carries a crown.

The British sports car badge MG stands for which two words, after the Oxford dealership where it began?

Morris Garages belonged to carmaker William Morris, and it was there that manager Cecil Kimber began producing his own special versions of Morris cars in the 1920s.

The 'T' that ends the explosive name TNT stands for which industrial solvent?

Toluene gives trinitrotoluene its last name; German chemist Julius Wilbrand first made the compound in 1863, and it was originally used not as an explosive but as a yellow dye.

The school acronym STEM replaced which earlier ordering of the same four letters, in official use until 2001?

SMET was the label the US National Science Foundation used until 2001, when its director Rita Colwell and fellow administrators adopted the reshuffled version.

The showbiz acronym EGOT was coined in 1984 by Philip Michael Thomas while he starred in which TV series?

Miami Vice had made him a star, and he said he wanted an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony within five years; the acronym only caught on after a 2009 episode of 30 Rock.

South Korea's LG got its two letters from a 1983 merger of the Lucky chemicals firm and which electronics maker?

GoldStar was set up in 1958 as the electronics side of a group that had started out in 1947 selling Lucky Cream, the first Korean make-up cream, before moving into plastics.

The fashion chain H&M began in 1947 as a shop called Hennes, a Swedish word meaning what?

Hers suited a shop that sold only women's clothing; the M arrived in 1968, when founder Erling Persson bought the hunting outfitter Mauritz Widforss and added a menswear range.

Which American company, broken up in 1911, gave the fuel brand Esso its name through its initials?

Standard Oil of New Jersey began selling under the name in 1926, turning its spoken initials S and O into a brand; in the early 1970s the parent renamed itself Exxon.

Sprint's name began as an acronym for the internal communications network of which kind of company?

A railroad: Sprint was the winning entry in a mid-1970s naming contest at Southern Pacific, standing for Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Networking Telecommunications.

The band UB40 took its name from a British government form connected with what?

UB40 stood for Unemployment Benefit, Form 40, an attendance card issued to claimants; the band's first album, Signing Off, was titled for ending their own claim.