Acronym Finder

Last updated
Acronym Finder
Acronymfinder.svg
Screenshot
AF Screenshot.png
Type of site
Dictionary
Available inEnglish
OwnerFarlex, Inc.
URL www.acronymfinder.com
CommercialYes
RegistrationNone
LaunchedSeptember 2, 1998;24 years ago (1998-09-02) [1]
Current statusOnline
Content license
Copyrighted

Acronym Finder (AF) is a free, online, searchable dictionary and database of abbreviations (acronyms, initialisms, and others) and their meanings.

Contents

The entries are classified into categories such as Information Technology, Military/Government, Science, Slang/Pop Culture etc. It also contains a database of the United States and Canadian postal codes. For abbreviations with multiple meanings, they are listed by popularity, with the most common one being listed first. As of 2018 it claims to have over a million "human-edited" and verified definitions. [2]

History

Acronym Finder was registered and the database put online by Michael K. Molloy of Colorado in 1997, but he began compiling it in 1985, working as a computer systems officer for the USAF. [3] Molloy first saw the need of an acronym list while integrating computers at the Randolph Air Force Base in Texas, his first acronym list running up to 30 pages. When he had retired and put AF online in 1997, his list already had 43,000 acronyms. It began mainly as a list of Military/Government abbreviations before expanding to other areas. [4]

Molloy and his wife served as the editors of the website, verifying user submissions for abbreviations and adding others they found to the database. Molloy has also provided opinions on abbreviations such as "MSG" which Madison Square Garden wanted as a domain name (msg.com), claiming trademark to the abbreviated letters. He stated that MSG also stood for more common things such as monosodium glutamate and message, among others. The Garden in the end settled out of court and came to own msg.com.

The website was maintained under Mountain Data Systems, LLC by Molloy, [5] [6] before being sold off and eventually coming under the ownership of Farlex, Inc. publishers of Thefreedictionary.com. [7]

Content

The website contains a database of meanings and expansions for abbreviations, acronyms, initialisms mainly in English but includes some entries in other languages such as French, German, Spanish etc. as well. [8] It is freely accessible. The entries are further classified into categories such as Information Technology, Military/Government, Science, Slang/Pop Culture etc. It also contains a database of US and Canadian postal codes which are shown on a Map along with location information. [9] Abbreviations with multiple expansions are listed by popularity with the most common one being presented first, these can be sorted alphabetically as well. [10] [11]

Anyone can contribute to the database by submitting abbreviations and their meanings, these are reviewed by an editor and categorized before being added to the database. [11] [3] While the database has been described as fairly accurate errors have been found in the meanings and expansions of abbreviations. [11] The website does not list sources for the abbreviations and their meanings but it does identify people who have contributed more than 50 abbreviations to the database. [11]

The database only contains abbreviations and their expansions and does not list other data such as grammatical category, context, source, field of the abbreviation etc. [11]

Farlex, Inc. The current owner of the website also publishes mobile apps for the Android and iOS operating systems. [7] [12]

Acronym Finder also includes a Systematic Buzz Phrase Projector, a light-hearted tool that randomly generates jargon-like phrases and abbreviations — usually initialisms that would be unpronounceable as acronyms — and meanings from 30 cleverly chosen buzz words.

The website is supported through advertisements. [3]

Reputation

The website is listed as a quick reference tool in directories like Stanford Library, Library of Congress, USC Library. [13] It has been cited as the largest database of acronyms [14] and has been used in computational studies for its database. [15]

Listings of abbreviations on the website have also been used as a defense that an abbreviation is in public use and cannot be trademarked. [16] While in some trademark cases citations for AF have been accepted it has been described as an unreliable reference in others. [3] [17]

It has garnered criticism for the fact that anyone can submit abbreviations to the site and the content is user generated. Mike Molloy the site's original owner had defended that each submission is verified before being added to the database. [3]

Related Research Articles

An abbreviation is a shortened form of a word or phrase, by any method. It may consist of a group of letters or words taken from the full version of the word or phrase; for example, the word abbreviation can itself be represented by the abbreviation abbr., abbrv., or abbrev.; NPO, for nil per (by) os (mouth) is an abbreviated medical instruction. It may also consist of initials only, a mixture of initials and words, or words or letters representing words in another language. Some types of abbreviations are acronyms or grammatical contractions or crasis.

A backronym is an acronym formed from an already existing word by expanding its letters into the words of a phrase. Backronyms may be invented with either serious or humorous intent, or they may be a type of false etymology or folk etymology. The word is a portmanteau of back and acronym.

A recursive acronym is an acronym that refers to itself, and appears most frequently in computer programming. The term was first used in print in 1979 in Douglas Hofstadter's book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, in which Hofstadter invents the acronym GOD, meaning "GOD Over Djinn", to help explain infinite series, and describes it as a recursive acronym. Other references followed, however the concept was used as early as 1968 in John Brunner's science fiction novel Stand on Zanzibar. In the story, the acronym EPT later morphed into "Eptification for Particular Task".

AF, af, Af, etc. may refer to:

A three-letter acronym (TLA), or three-letter abbreviation, is an abbreviation consisting of three letters. These are usually the initial letters of the words of the phrase abbreviated, and are written in capital letters ; three-letter abbreviations such as etc. and Mrs. are not three-letter acronyms, but "TLA" itself is a TLA.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LOL</span> Internet slang

LOL, or lol, is an initialism for laughing out loud and a popular element of Internet slang. It was first used almost exclusively on Usenet, but has since become widespread in other forms of computer-mediated communication and even face-to-face communication. It is one of many initialisms for expressing bodily reactions, in particular laughter, as text, including initialisms for more emphatic expressions of laughter such as LMAO and ROFL or ROTFL.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">RAS syndrome</span> Acronym redundantly coupled with its word(s)

RAS syndrome is the redundant use of one or more of the words that make up an acronym in conjunction with the abbreviated form. This means, in effect, repeating one or more words from the acronym. Three common examples are "PIN number" / "VIN number" and "ATM machine". The term RAS syndrome was coined in 2001 in a light-hearted column in New Scientist.

<i>The Free Dictionary</i> American online dictionary and encyclopedia that gathers information from a variety of sources

The Free Dictionary is an American online dictionary and encyclopedia that aggregates information from various sources. It is accessible in fourteen languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Acronym</span> Word or name made from the initial components of the words of a sequence

An acronym is a word or name consisting of parts of the full name's words. Acronyms are usually formed from the initial letters of words, as in NATO, but sometimes use syllables, as in Benelux, NAPOCOR, and TRANSCO. They can also be a mixture, as in radar and MIDAS.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AutoIt</span>

AutoIt is a freeware programming language for Microsoft Windows. In its earliest release, it was primarily intended to create automation scripts for Microsoft Windows programs but has since grown to include enhancements in both programming language design and overall functionality.

Petfinder is an internet company that operates the largest online pet adoption website serving all of North America. The company reports that it currently lists “more than 315,000 adoptable pets from nearly 14,000 animal shelters and rescue groups.” A commercial enterprise founded in 1996, it is now owned by Nestlé Purina PetCare Company and reports that it has facilitated more than 22 million pet adoptions as of 2013. Most of the pets listed on Petfinder are dogs and cats, but they list all types of animals available from shelters and rescue groups, from small fish, reptiles and birds to horses and livestock.

Gene nomenclature is the scientific naming of genes, the units of heredity in living organisms. It is also closely associated with protein nomenclature, as genes and the proteins they code for usually have similar nomenclature. An international committee published recommendations for genetic symbols and nomenclature in 1957. The need to develop formal guidelines for human gene names and symbols was recognized in the 1960s and full guidelines were issued in 1979. Several other genus-specific research communities have adopted nomenclature standards, as well, and have published them on the relevant model organism websites and in scientific journals, including the Trends in Genetics Genetic Nomenclature Guide. Scientists familiar with a particular gene family may work together to revise the nomenclature for the entire set of genes when new information becomes available. For many genes and their corresponding proteins, an assortment of alternate names is in use across the scientific literature and public biological databases, posing a challenge to effective organization and exchange of biological information. Standardization of nomenclature thus tries to achieve the benefits of vocabulary control and bibliographic control, although adherence is voluntary. The advent of the information age has brought gene ontology, which in some ways is a next step of gene nomenclature, because it aims to unify the representation of gene and gene product attributes across all species.

Scientific terminology is the part of the language that is used by scientists in the context of their professional activities. While studying nature, scientists often encounter or create new material or immaterial objects and concepts and are compelled to name them. Many of those names are known only to professionals. However, due to popularization of science, they gradually become part of common languages. Several categories of scientific terminology can be distinguished.

A breviograph or brevigraph is a type of scribal abbreviation in the form of an easily written symbol, character, flourish or stroke, based on a modified letter form to take the place of a common letter combination, especially those occurring at the beginning or end of a word. Breviographs were used frequently by stenographers, law clerks and scriveners, and they were also found in early printed books and tracts. Their use declined after the 17th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yesod (web framework)</span>

Yesod is a free and open-source web framework based on Haskell for productive development of type-safe, REST model based, high performance web applications, developed by Michael Snoyman et al.

Express.js, or simply Express, is a back end web application framework for building RESTful APIs with Node.js, released as free and open-source software under the MIT License. It is designed for building web applications and APIs. It has been called the de facto standard server framework for Node.js.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">.top</span> Generic top-level Internet domain

.top is a generic top-level domain, officially delegated in ICANN's New gTLD Program on August 4, 2014.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Abbreviations.com</span>

Abbreviations.com is an online abbreviations dictionary whose domain was first registered on 2001. The company was founded by Yigal Ben Efraim as part of STANDS4 LLC, which also operates Lyrics.com, Grammar.com and Symbols.com among other reference related websites.

References

  1. "AcronymFinder.com WHOIS, DNS, & Domain Info". whois.domaintools.com. Retrieved 14 April 2018.
  2. "About AcronymFinder.com". www.acronymfinder.com. Retrieved 2018-04-13.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 Barry Newman (January 13, 2007). "BTW, if you need Info About C4ISR, Read This ASAP". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 22 May 2013.
  4. "Website of the Week — Acronym Finder (MP3)". VOA. Retrieved 2018-04-14.
  5. "Acronym finder [digital] : AF. in SearchWorks catalog". searchworks.stanford.edu. Retrieved 2018-04-14.[ permanent dead link ]
  6. "About AcronymFinder.com". acronymfinder.com. Archived from the original on 2013-06-28. Retrieved 2018-04-14.
  7. 1 2 "Acronym Finder - Apps on Google Play". play.google.com. Retrieved 2018-04-14.
  8. "Acronym Finder". dbis.uni-regensburg.de. Universität Regensburg . Retrieved 2018-04-13.
  9. "e-Tipp der Woche: Acronym Finder | [UB]log". blog.ub.uni-osnabrueck.de (in German). Retrieved 2018-04-13.
  10. "Acronym Finder - ExtremeTech". ExtremeTech. 2001-09-05. Retrieved 2018-04-14.
  11. 1 2 3 4 5 GIRALDO ORTIZ, John Jairo. Management of initialisms in the online abbreviations dictionary Acronym Finder. Revista Interamericana de Bibliotecología. Jul.-Dec. 2008, vol. 31, no. 2, p. 101-117
  12. "Acronym Finder - Acronyms, Abbreviations, Initialisms, and more on the App Store". App Store. Retrieved 2018-04-14.
  13. "Acronym finder [digital] : AF". searchworks.stanford.edu. Stanford Libraries SearchWorks "Acronym Finder". libraries.usc.edu. USC Libraries. "Virtual Reference Shelf - Ask a Librarian". loc.gov. Library of Congress
  14. Sánchez, David; Isern, David (2011). "Automatic extraction of acronym definitions from the Web". Applied Intelligence. 34 (2): 311–327. doi:10.1007/s10489-009-0197-4. S2CID   10777157.
  15. Leah S. Larkey; Paul Ogilvie; M. Andrew Price; Brenden Tamilio (2000). "Acrophile: An Automated Acronym Extractor and Server" (PDF).
  16. The United States Patents Quarterly. Bureau of National Affairs. 2004. p. 1283.
  17. "CTM upheld after medical trade mark declared not to be descriptive". oami.europa.eu. September 20, 2011. Archived from the original on November 23, 2011. Retrieved 2018-04-14.