An acronym is a word whose letters are the first letters of other words. People often create a short acronym that means the same thing as a much longer phrase (set of words). This is faster and shorter to say than the long phrase.
Examples of acronyms are:
An acronym usually must be able to be spoken as word. Other abbreviations such as ASAP[1] (as soon as possible), USA[2] (the United States of America), ECU[3] (European Currency Unit), FBI[4] (Federal Bureau of Investigation), NBA[5] (National Basketball Association) have combinations of letters that are not pronounced as a single word. People just say the letters, one after another.
These three-letter acronyms,[6] and some more obscure four-letter ones such as ISDN are more often called initialisms.
The word "acronym" comes from the Greek acro ‘extreme’ and onymus ‘name’.
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