We’ve been a little self-indulgent and playful during the holiday season, but readers are calling us back to business. Here’s one: For many years I have had anxiety about the plurals of acronyms and ...

ICYMI (in case you missed it), acronyms, abbreviations, and initialisms are ways to shorten phrases and ideas both in normal speech and through texting and email. But a common FAQ (frequently asked ...

In a recent newsletter, we asked the question “Who’s minding the acronym store?” The major point there was that our industry has a most confusing habit of reusing the same combinations of letters for ...

I often remove unwieldy acronyms from articles I'm editing. The writer might assume that all readers know that acronym, but that often isn't so. Webster's New World College Dictionary defines an ...

Acronyms are stronger. Abbreviations are wimpy abbreviated versions of the real thing. Acronyms can take on lives of their own. Consider AARP. It used to mean “American Association of Retired Persons.

The initialism ‘FB’ used on social media has been declared the most confusing of all time, with 364,274 monthly searches in the UK. Overall, the five most confusing social media slang terms are FB ...

Q: What exactly is an initialism? Is that like an acronym? A recent Hotline column used an “initialism,” but I’ve never heard of that before. A: The difference between an “initialism” and an “acronym” ...