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Three-letter acronym

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"TLA" redirects here. For other uses, see TLA (disambiguation).

The three-letter acronym, or TLA, is the most popular type of abbreviation in technical terminology, and is also very common in general language.

Abbreviations:

Three-letter acronym is most often abbreviated TLA (which is itself a TLA).

Since TLA could also stand for two-letter abbreviation, it could be ambiguous. The abbreviation 3LA is less ambiguous, but much less frequently used. (3LA is probably a TLA, see Description below.)

Questionable construction:

While three-letter acronym is the older and more frequently used term, some have argued that most TLAs are not really acronyms at all, and advocate using the term three-letter abbreviation instead. Three-letter abbreviation happens to share the same abbreviation: TLA.

Three-letter abbreviation encompasses a stricter definition of three-letter acronym and a possibly distinct type, three-letter initialism, a term that is now seen occasionally (e.g., see RDO). The definition of acronym may be splitting. (See Acronym and initialism and List of acronyms and initialisms.) If one pronounces an abbreviation as a word, then it can be an acronym (like FAQ) or a contraction (like abs). If one recites the letters of the abbreviation (like PDQ), then it is probably an initialism. If one says something other than what is obvious (sees "etc.", but says "Et Cetera"), then it is probably an ordinary abbreviation.

Synonyms:

The term trigram may be inclusive of TLAs.

Overview & Concept

TLA is a three-letter abbreviation itself; the term was almost certainly coined with a certain degree of self-referential humor in mind. Many TLAs are in fact recursive acronyms -- in which one of the letters is the abbreviation for the TLA itself. Well-known examples include:

  • GNU, for "Gnu's Not Unix" — doubly humorous, as the raison d'être of GNU was to be a free replacement for Unix (thus its TLA defines it by both recursion — self-reference, and contrast — what it is not).
  • PHP, for "PHP Hypertext Pre-processor" (originally "Personal Home Page tools") — a popular web-page scripting language.

Likewise, the following acronyms are sometimes used for four-letter abbreviations:

  • FLAB (Four Letter ABbreviation)
  • ETLA or XTLA (Enhanced or eXtended TLA)
  • LFLA (Longer Four Letter Abbreviation)
  • TLA/E (TLA/Extended)
  • IVLA (IV Letter Acronym, replacing the European numeral 4 with the Roman two-letter variant)

In the same vein, the following five-letter initialisms are sometimes used:

  • VLFLA (Very Long Five Letter Abbreviation)
  • DETLA (Doubly Extended Three Letter Abbreviation)

This can be carried on even further:

  • NVSSLA (Not Very Short Six Letter Abbreviation)
  • TLAETT (Three Letter Abbreviation Extended Three Times)

Interestingly enough, one can also encounter the variants:

  • ATLA (Another Three Letter Acronym)
  • YATLA (Yet Another Three Letter Acronym)

However, all of those forms are far less common than TLA.

Note that acronyms/initializations (whether TLAs or longer) beginning with "YA" are quite common, particularly in information technology. Notable examples include:

  • Yahoo! -- Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle,
  • yacc -- Yet Another Compiler Compiler -- a key programmer's tool in Unix/GNU systems, and,
  • YABA -- Yet Another Bloody Acronym.

Background

TLAs became common in the United States during the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (who is frequently referred to as FDR). Terms from this period included NRA for National Recovery Administration, CCC for the Civilian Conservation Corps, and TVA for the Tennessee Valley Authority. Detractors of President Roosevelt's policies called the new agencies "alphabet soup."

According to acronyms.com, TLA was coined by Jeff Kelley (John F. Kelley, Ph.D., CPE) who worked at the time at IBM, a company whose name itself was a TLA. Kelley reports vaguely recalling that the date on which he coined the term was around 1985. However, the Google Groups archive has a citation from a Chip Rosenthal of Intel for "Three-letter acronym" antedated to September 18, 1984 [1]. At least two references to the term from 1982 can be found on the Google Groups Usenet archive as well, one from net.games.frp [2] and one from a post to net.jokes entitled The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Net.

Description

Using only upper-case letters and ignoring diacritics, there are 26³ = 17,576 possible three-letter abbreviations, and probably most of them are already used in some context. If one or two numbers are included (e.g. 4GL, Y2K), the total swells to 45,656. If special characters (eg. R&R) or case-sensitivity (eg. WfW) are allowed, many more TLAs can be created, but these might more properly be called TCAs (Three Character Abbreviations).

Many TLAs have more than one meaning: TLA itself is also a TLA for the Theater of the Living Arts among other things. There are many TLAs with more than 10 meanings (for example, SDI has at least 36 meanings in the English language). Furthermore, many abbreviations have more than one expansion with the same meaning. For example, GCC first represented GNU C Compiler, but was later changed to mean GNU Compiler Collection (see also backronym).

In the MS-DOS operating system for personal computers, because only three-letter file extensions (usually denoting the file type) were allowed, many longer abbreviations were shortened to three letters (for example JPEG to JPG, HTML to HTM), and many of these are still used. DOS itself is a TLA for Disk Operating System, although Microsoft has since changed its definition of the term to Desktop Operating System.

Many abbreviations, some of them TLAs, come from the shortened names of Usenet groups. For example, PRA for pl.rec.anime, or AFU for alt.folklore.urban.

Sometimes the prefix "ex-" is represented by an "X" in the abbreviation, as in "XML" for "Extensible Markup Language".

Usage

TLAs are typically pronounced with names of the letters (e.g., Tee Ell Ay) and written in all capital letters. Some are pronounced as words (e.g., RAM), and others are used both ways (e.g., FAQ). TLAs are pluralized by adding s (as in TLAs). The possessive is formed by adding apostrophe and s (as in IBM's). TLAs are particularly prone to RAS syndrome ("Redundant Acronym Syndrome syndrome"), in which one of the abbreviated words (usually the last) is added alongside the abbreviation itself - as in "ATM machine", "PIN number", and "HIV virus". Purists recommend avoiding RAS syndrome, especially in formal writing such as technical writing.

Common categories of TLAs

A significant number of TLAs come from various codes:

List of all possible TLAs

There are 17,576 possible TLAs (), all of which are referenced in the following lists:

Other lists of TLAs

Trivia

  • According to the Jargon File, a journalist once asked hacker Paul Boutin what he thought the biggest problem in computing in the 1990s would be. Paul's straight-faced response was, "There are only 17,000 three-letter acronyms."
  • In 1998 the British band Love and Rockets released their last album, Lift, featuring the song "R.I.P. 20 C." that, apart from the refrain, consists of three-letter acronyms only. A contest was held, the first to correctly give the meanings of all 69 of them being rewarded.
  • In 1999 German hip-hop group Die Fantastischen Vier released the song "MFG" (German for "Mit freundlichen Grüßen" (best regards)), also mainly consisting of TLAs. [3]

See also

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