The true story of acronyms and initialisms, like you’ve never heard it before.

According to the IRA Style Guide, acronyms and initialisms are defined as follows:

Both acronyms and initialisms are groups of letters that stand for a group of words. The distinction has to do with the way they are pronounced: True acronyms are pronounced as words (ERIC, JAAL, and UNESCO are good examples). Properly speaking, groups of letters that are pronounced separately (e.g., IRA, DNA, FBI) are initialisms. In common usage the distinction is ignored, and all such letter groups are referred to as acronyms.

What does that mean, in speak-to-me-like-a-child talk?

Basically, acronyms and initialisms are like twins – we’ll call them Acy and Iny.

Acy (the acronym) and Iny (the intialism) both come from Mr. and Mrs. Abbreviation. Both of these guys take strings of words and use a combination of letters (usually using the beginning letter of each word) to represent and shorten the original message. While Acy and Iny look a lot alike, there is a major difference. Acy is able to pronounce his abbreviations in what sounds like words in and of themselves. Iny is only able to speak in letters.

However, most people find it easier to just refer to Iny as his brother Acy – which most people do to simplify life, but sometimes they do so out of ignorance.

Here at AcroMaker, we refer only to Acy out of simplicity. We’re sorry Iny.