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Three-letter acronym

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Template:Short description {{ safesubst:#invoke:Unsubst||date=__DATE__ |$B= Template:Ambox }} A three-letter acronym (TLA), or three-letter abbreviation is, as the phrase suggests, an abbreviation consisting of three letters. The term has a special status among abbreviations and to some is considered humorous since the term TLA is itself a three-letter acronym; it is an autological word.

Most TLAs are initialisms (the initial letter of each word of a phrase), but most are not acronyms in the strict sense since they are pronounced by saying each letter, as in APA Template:IPAc-en Template:Respell. Some are true acronyms (pronounced as a word) such as CAT (as in CAT scan) which is pronounced as the animal.

ExamplesEdit

History and originsEdit

The exact phrase three-letter acronym appeared in the sociology literature in 1975.<ref name=Levy>Template:Cite journal</ref> Three-letter acronyms were used as mnemonics in biological sciences, from 1977<ref name=Seavey>Template:Cite journal</ref> and their practical advantage was promoted by Weber in 1982.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> They are used in many other fields, but the term TLA is particularly associated with computing.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> In 1980, the manual for the Sinclair ZX81 home computer used and explained TLA.<ref name=ZX81>Steven Vickers ZX81 Basic Programming, Sinclair Research Limited, page 161 "As you can see, everything has a three letter abbreviation (TLA)."</ref> The specific generation of three-letter acronyms in computing was mentioned in a JPL report of 1982.<ref name=JPL>TDA Progress Report R. Hull (1982) An Introduction to the new Productivity Information Management System page 176</ref> In 1988, in a paper titled "On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computing Science", eminent computer scientist Edsger W. Dijkstra wrote (disparagingly), "No endeavour is respectable these days without a TLA"<ref>On the cruelty of really teaching computer science</ref> By 1992 it was in a Microsoft handbook.<ref>Dan Gookin (1992) The Microsoft Guide to Optimizing Windows page 211</ref>

CombinatoricsEdit

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. Allowing a single digit 0-9 increases this by 26 × 26 × 10 = 6,760 for each position, such as 2FA, P2P, or WW2, giving a total of 37,856 such three-character strings.

Out of the 17,576 possible TLAs that can be created using 3 uppercase letters, at least 94% of them had been used at least once in a dataset of 18 million scientific article abstracts. Three-letter acronyms are the most common type of acronym in scientific research papers, with acronyms of length 3 being twice as common as those of length 2 or 4.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

In standard English, WWW is the TLA whose pronunciation requires the most syllables—typically nine. The usefulness of a TLA typically comes from its being quicker to say than the phrase it represents; however saying 'WWW' in English requires three times as many syllables as the phrase it is meant to abbreviate (World Wide Web). "WWW" is sometimes abbreviated to "dubdubdub" in speech.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

See alsoEdit

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ReferencesEdit

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