I was surprised to find out that there were words I have been saying my whole life that were actually acronyms. Acronyms are everywhere and most of us use them all the time but not everyone knows what they stand for, like LASER or IKEA. We have combined in this article some of the most common acronyms and we have sorted them from the easiest to the most difficult. You will find the ones at the top quite easy to guess but as you make your way to the bottom I doubt you will know what they stand for. Please tell us in comment how many did you know.
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I knew ten acronyms.
Your explanation of YAHOO (the web site, etc.) may be true, but it is a well-known word/concept from Gulliver’s Travels!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_(Gulliver%27s_Travels)
Yahoos are legendary beings in the 1726 satirical novel Gulliver’s Travels written by Jonathan Swift.[1] Their behaviour and character representation is meant to comment on the state of Europe from Swift’s point of view.[1] The word “yahoo” was coined by Jonathan Swift in the fourth section of Gulliver’s Travels[2] and has since entered the English language more broadly.
Swift describes Yahoos as filthy with unpleasant habits, “a brute in human form,”[2] resembling human beings far too closely for the liking of protagonist Lemuel Gulliver. He finds the calm and rational society of intelligent horses, the Houyhnhnms, greatly preferable.
The Yahoos are primitive creatures obsessed with “pretty stones” that they find by digging in mud, thus representing the distasteful materialism and ignorant elitism Swift encountered in Britain. Hence the term “yahoo” has come to mean “a crude, brutish or obscenely coarse person”.[3]
When I was younger, I thought RSVP stood for “refreshments served very promptly.” Ironically, I spent my career teaching French.
Very interesting and informative and could usefui to teachers
Oops. “Wi-fi” is not an acronym. Although many believe it is a play on “hi-fi” for high fidelity for music, wi-fi is a simply a name for a group of wireless technologies.
SOS is just plain wrong. In radiotelegraphy, for which it was designed, it is a SINGLE character, …—… which is not any letter or any combination thereof. If one wishes to break …—… into letters for some irrelevant, ficticious purpose, VMB, IEMTS, or any of several other messes.
That character is a single symbol, usually repeated three times, at the beginning of a distress call. To a telegrapher, the sound is unmistakeable for anything else. The words cited came later and are invention based upon misunderstanding.
An actual telegraphic transmission of the letters S, O, and S, in that order would require the time of a dash between the letters: … — …
According to Hormel (the company who makes it), it is not an acronym — it is a contraction for SPiced hAM.
The difference between acronyms and abbreviations is that acronyms form a word like “laser” or “IKEA” whereas abbreviations are just several letters put together like “USB” or “GPS”.