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 totally different concepts.

You'll note our careful use of "combinations of letters" as opposed to "acronyms" because, as our colleague, Ray Horak, author of Webster's New World Telecom Dictionary, and others so aptly pointed out, not all combinations of letters are acronyms.

For that reason, and for your reading pleasure, we’d like to share Ray’s comments with you. He wrote: “Note, however, that FUBAR and MAC are acronyms while ATM, MPLS and SLA acronyms are initialisms. The following definitions from my book might help a bit:

“Abbreviation: A shortened form of a word or phrase. P-phone, for example, is an abbreviation of Proprietary phone. Acronyms, contractions, and initialisms are special forms of abbreviations comprising the initial letters or other parts of several words that constitute a term.

“Acronym: A pronounceable word formed of the initial letters or other parts of several words. An acronym generally comprises all upper case letters. SONET, for example, is the acronym for Synchronous Optical NETwork, a North American standard for fiber optic transmission systems. SONET became internationalized as SDH, an unpronounceable initialism for Synchronous Digital Hierarchy. Acronyms occasionally comprise all lower case letters. For example, bit is the acronym for binary digit, which is the basic unit of information in a binary numbering system. Bit also is a word unto itself, and with multiple meanings, including a small piece of something. Acronyms sometimes comprise both upper case and lower case letters. Sesame, for example, is the acronym for Secure European Systems for Applications in a Multivendor Environment.”

[We’ll note here that in an upcoming newsletter we’ll be featuring an increasingly important acronym for the WAN, SCADA.]

“Anacronym (anachronism acronym): A portmanteau of anachronism and acronym that describes an acronym or initialism that has been used so long and become so ingrained in common language that its original spelled-out meaning is unknown to many, if not most. As examples, consider ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), radar (radio detecting and ranging), SCSI (Small Computer System Interface), scuba (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus), and sonar (sound navigation and ranging).