THREE-LETTER ACRONYM

'Three-letter abbreviations' ('TLA's, often inaccurately referred to as 'three-letter acronyms') are commonly used in industry and other fields. The first known usage of the term "TLA" was by Texas Instruments Inc. employees in the Industrial Systems Division circa 1984. Engineers used to mock the marketing department's tendency to define new products with three-word descriptions, such as "CVU" for a product line called "Control Vision Unit" and "ACM" for "Automation Configuration Module." Due to the seemingly excessive use of three-letter acronyms or initialisms at the company, the employees started to simply report that they were working on product "TLA." Note the interesting property that this word describes itself, i.e., it is self-referencing. Usage of "TLA" spread through both the industry and academia, and now has become a generally understood initialism. For a complete discussion of the various forms of abbreviations, acronyms and other letter substitutions, see ''acronyms''.

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Other Information and References in Popular Culture

See also

References

External links

Other Information and References in Popular Culture

★ Very few of the abbreviations described as "three-letter acronyms" are in fact acronyms — to be an acronym, an abbreviation must be pronounced as a word rather than as the names of letters. CVU, ACM, TLA, FBI, CIA, etc. are all abbreviations (and initialisms), but none of them are acronyms. An example of a three-letter acronym would be the Basque separatist group ETA, pronounced "etta" (IPA pronunciation: [)).

★ The number of possible three-letter abbreviations using the 26 letters of the alphabet from A to Z ( AAA, AAB ... to ZZY, ZZZ) is 26 × 26 × 26 = 17,576. An exhaustive listing of TLAs can be found in .

★ 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."

★ The Jargon File also mentions the term "ETLA," for "Extended Three-Letter Acronym," to refer to four-letter acronyms.

★ In English, WWW is the longest possible TLA to pronounce, requiring nine syllables. The author Douglas Adams remarked "The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it's short for." ^[1]

★ 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 abbreviations only. A contest was held rewarding the first to correctly give the meanings of all 69 of them.

★ 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. [1]

★ In 1986 Will Shatter of the band Flipper formed a band named "Any Three Initials" (ATI), as a parody of the preponderance of hardcore punk bands with three-initial names.

★ As early as 1967, the musical ''Hair'' included the song "Initials," whose chorus consisted only of the TLAs "LBJ IRT, USA LSD. LSD LBJ, FBI CIA. FBI CIA, LSD LBJ."

See also

★

★ RAS syndrome

★ List of acronyms and initialisms

★ List of all two-letter combinations

★ List of computing and IT abbreviations

★ List of three-letter broadcast callsigns in the United States

★ To be done: put reference to TLA generated from three variables where each variable is [A B C D E ... X Y Z 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9].

References

1. Douglas Adams, The Independent on Sunday, 1999

External links

★ Abbreviations.com — A directory and search engine for acronyms, initialisms, and other abbreviations.

★ Acronymfinder.com — Resource to find multiple meanings of acronyms, sorted by type.

★ TLA Wörterbuch - Casia TLA collection

★ GTF - the GPL'ed TLA FAQ

★ The Great Abbreviations Hunt - A TLA for every combination of letters