acronym

/ˌækrəˈnɪm/

/ˈækrənɪm/

Other forms: acronyms

Are the members of your skydiving club tripping over the name Student Parachuting League & Aerial Team? Why not use each word's first letter to make an acronym, and call the club SPLAT? There, that’s better.

What do NASA, sonar, and scuba have in common? They are all acronyms. Not only does each letter come from the first letter of another word, but each group of letters is easy to pronounce as its own word. Though its roots are classical (acro means "tip" and nym means "name"), acronym is fairly new as English words go: it's been around since the early 1940s.

Definitions of acronym

1. noun

   a word formed from the initial letters of the several words in the name
   type of:

   descriptor, form, signifier, word form

   the phonological or orthographic sound or appearance of a word that can be used to describe or identify something