Acronym Trivia
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119 free Acronym trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
61 free acronym trivia questions with answers. Half the words you use every day started life as capital letters. This acronym trivia quiz asks what they actually stand for: NASA, scuba, laser, radar and sonar; UNICEF, UNESCO, OPEC and NATO; GIF, JPEG, PDF, HTML, URL, USB and GPS; ZIP codes, PINs, SIM cards and CAPTCHAs; and the brands, from IKEA, BMW and 3M to GEICO, Alcoa, Nabisco, Haribo and M&M's. It also separates fact from folklore: why Wi-Fi is not really 'wireless fidelity', what Hormel will and won't say about Spam, the Tom Swift novel behind the Taser, why SOS was chosen, and the backronyms people invent for Adidas, wiki, Yahoo and pan-pan. Internet shorthand gets a round too: LOL, YOLO, TL;DR and SNAFU. About a third of the questions are gimmes, a third need a good memory, and the rest will surprise most people. Every answer is checked against a cited source shown under the question.
30 of 119 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What does the first 'A' in NASA stand for?
Aeronautics
Aeronautics: NASA was built in 1958 on NACA, a federal aeronautics research agency founded in 1915, whose laboratories and staff it took over.
Q 02'Scuba' began as an acronym for what?
Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus
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.
Q 03The word 'laser' stands for light amplification by stimulated emission of what?
Radiation
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.
Q 04The acronym RADAR stands for radio what and ranging?
Detection
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.
Q 05What does the 'so' in 'sonar' stand for?
Sound
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.
Q 06UNICEF originally stood for the United Nations International Children's what?
Emergency Fund
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.
Q 07What does the 'S' in UNESCO stand for?
Scientific
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'.
Q 08What does the 'P' in OPEC stand for?
Petroleum
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.
Q 09GIF stands for Graphics Interchange what?
Format
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'.
Q 10The letters JPEG come from the name of what?
A committee of experts
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.
Q 11What does the 'R' in RAM stand for?
Random
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.
Q 12What does the 'M' in HTML stand for?
Markup
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.
Q 13URL stands for Uniform Resource what?
Locator
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.
Q 21Why is the phrase 'PIN number' considered redundant?
The final letter already means that
Personal identification number; the N is 'number', so 'ATM machine' commits the same sin.
Q 22IKEA is an acronym built from Ingvar Kamprad's initials plus what?
His family farm and hometown
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.
Q 23The second M in M&M's stands for Bruce Murrie, whose father was president of which chocolate company?
Hershey
Q 14Who came up with the name Wi-Fi?
The brand consultancy Interbrand
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.
Q 15CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public what?
Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart
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.
Q 16ZIP in 'ZIP Code' stands for what?
Zone Improvement Plan
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.
Q 17The name Taser loosely honours which fictional boy inventor from a 1911 novel?
Tom Swift
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.'
Q 18CARE, founded in 1945 to send food parcels abroad, originally stood for the Cooperative for American Remittances to where?
Europe
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'.
Q 19SIM in SIM card stands for what?
Subscriber Identity Module
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.
Q 20What does LED stand for?
Light-emitting diode
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.
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.
Q 24What did 3M originally stand for?
Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing
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.
Q 25The 'B' in BMW refers to which German state?
Bavaria
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.
Q 26GEICO stands for what?
Government Employees Insurance Company
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.
Q 27Spam's name is popularly read as a contraction of which two words?
Spiced ham
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.
Q 28Yahoo's own company history called its name an acronym for what?
Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle
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'.
Q 29The name Lego comes from a Danish phrase meaning what?
Play well
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.
Q 30What does MASH stand for in M*A*S*H?
Mobile Army Surgical Hospital
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.