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Three-letter acronym

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

TLA is a three-lettered abbreviation for Three-Letter Abbreviation or Three-Letter Acronym. The originator of this initialism was quite probably indulging in a little self-referential humor. TLA could also stand for two-letter abbreviation, or indeed, twelve-, thirteen- or twenty-letter abbreviation. The abbreviation 3LA is less ambiguous, but much less frequently used. Quite a small number of TLA's are actually acronyms.

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[edit] 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."[1]

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. 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. The user manual for the Sinclair ZX81 personal computer, released in 1981, contains the sentence, "As you can see, everything has a three letter abbreviation (TLA),"[3] referring to the abbreviations of the parts.

[edit] 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 48 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 (see 8.3), 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".

[edit] Usage

TLAs are always written entirely in capital letters, and nearly always pronounced with names of the letters (e.g., Tee Ell Ay). Those few that are pronounced as words (e.g., RAM) are true acronyms, of which only nine appear on this page. Some TLAs are pronounced either way (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 appended to 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. Not to be underestimated in significance is the TLA's cousin, the ETLA.

[edit] Common categories of TLAs

A significant number of TLAs come from various codes:

[edit] List of all possible TLAs

There are 17,576 possible TLAs (26 × 26 × 26), all of which are referenced in the following lists:

[edit] Other lists of TLAs

[edit] 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."
  • The Jargon File also mentions the term "ETLA", for "Extended Three-Letter Acronym", to refer to four-letter acronyms, implying that three letters is the canonical length for acronyms.
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.

—Douglas Adams, The Independent on Sunday, 1999

  • 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 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. [4]

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

de:Dreibuchstabenabkürzung fr:Sigles de trois lettres it:TLA nl:DLA pl:Skróty trzyliterowe sl:Tričrkovna kratica sv:TLA

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