• Diddlydee@feddit.uk
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    5 days ago

    For info, AI is an initialism, not an acronym. Acronyms are pronounced like words (NASA, NATO), whereas initialisms are just the letters (AI, FBI).

    • tal
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      5 days ago

      Wikipedia has that this is not the common-use definition of “acronym”, though some argue for it. In the common-use sense, an initialism is just one type of acronym.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym

      For some, an initialism or alphabetism, connotes this general meaning, and an acronym is a subset with a narrower definition: an acronym is pronounced as a word rather than as a sequence of letters. In this sense, NASA /ˈnæsə/ is an acronym but USA /juːɛsˈeɪ/ is not.

      The broader sense of acronym, ignoring pronunciation, is its original meaning and in common use. Dictionary and style-guide editors dispute whether the term acronym can be legitimately applied to abbreviations which are not pronounced as words, and they do not agree on acronym spacing, casing, and punctuation.