Fraternity Manuals

TLA

From Open Encyclopedia

For other uses of "TLA", see TLA (disambiguation).

The TLA (three-letter acronym or three-letter abbreviation) is the most popular type of abbreviation in technical terminology, and is also very common in general language. While three-letter acronym is the older and more frequently cited term, many argue that use of the word acronym here is incorrect (see acronym and initialism), and therefore advocate using abbreviation in its place. Since TLA can also stand for "two-letter acronym", it is ambiguous; the abbreviation 3LA or the term trigram can be used instead.

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Background

TLA is a three-letter abbreviation itself; the term was almost certainly coined with a certain degree of self-referential humor in mind. 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)

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

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

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.

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.

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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 numbers, special characters, or case-sensitivity are allowed, even more TLAs can be created.

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 "XFL" for "Extreme Football League."

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Usage

TLAs are typically pronounced as initialisms (e.g., Tee Ell Ay) and written in all capital letters. Some, however are acronyms, and are pronounced as words (e.g., RAM), while some find examples of usage both ways (e.g., FAQ). TLAs are pluralized by adding s (as in TLAs). The possessive is formed by adding apostrophes (as in TLA'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.

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Common categories of TLAs

A significant number of TLAs come from various codes:

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Lists of TLAs

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Trivia

According to the Jargon File, a journalist once asked hacker Paul Boutin what he thought the biggest problem in computing in the 90s would be. Paul's straight-faced response was, "There are only 17,000 three-letter acronyms."

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See also

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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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