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 itself can be abbreviated as abbr., abbrv., or abbrev.. 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".
A figure of speech or rhetorical figure is a word or phrase that intentionally deviates from ordinary language use to produce a rhetorical effect. Figures of speech are traditionally classified into schemes, which vary the ordinary sequence of words, and tropes, where words carry a meaning other than what they ordinarily signify.
Pleonasm is redundancy in linguistic expression, such as "black darkness" or "burning fire". It is a manifestation of tautology by traditional rhetorical criteria and might be considered a fault of style. Pleonasm may also be used for emphasis, or because the phrase has become established in a certain form. Tautology and pleonasm are not consistently differentiated in literature.
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.
"Survival of the fittest" is a phrase that originated from Darwinian evolutionary theory as a way of describing the mechanism of natural selection. The biological concept of fitness is defined as reproductive success. In Darwinian terms, the phrase is best understood as "[s]urvival of the form that in successive generations will leave most copies of itself."
Self-referential humor, also known as self-reflexive humor, self-aware humor, or meta humor, is a type of comedic expression that—either directed toward some other subject, or openly directed toward itself—is self-referential in some way, intentionally alluding to the very person who is expressing the humor in a comedic fashion, or to some specific aspect of that same comedic expression. Here, meta is used to describe that the joke explicitly talks about other jokes, a usage similar to the words metadata, metatheatrics and metafiction. Self-referential humor expressed discreetly and surrealistically is a form of bathos. In general, self-referential humor often uses hypocrisy, oxymoron, or paradox to create a contradictory or otherwise absurd situation that is humorous to the audience.
An acronym, a type of abbreviation, is a word or name consisting of parts of the full name's words. Some authorities add that an acronym must be pronounced as a single word rather than individual letters, so considering NASA an acronym but not USA; the latter they instead call an initialism or alphabetism, for a string of initial letters which are pronounced individually. Acronyms commonly are formed from initials alone, such as NATO, FBI, YMCA, GIF, EMT, and PIN, but sometimes use syllables instead, as in Benelux, NAPOCOR, and TRANSCO. They can also be a mixture, as in radar and MIDAS.
In engineering and systems theory, redundancy is the intentional duplication of critical components or functions of a system with the goal of increasing reliability of the system, usually in the form of a backup or fail-safe, or to improve actual system performance, such as in the case of GNSS receivers, or multi-threaded computer processing.
In linguistics, a redundancy is information that is expressed more than once.
Reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS), also known as reliability, availability, and maintainability (RAM), is a computer hardware engineering term involving reliability engineering, high availability, and serviceability design. The phrase was originally used by International Business Machines (IBM) as a term to describe the robustness of their mainframe computers.
Notarikon is a Talmudic and Kabbalistic method of deriving a word, by using each of its initial or final letters to stand for another, to form a sentence or idea out of the words. Another variation uses the first and last letters, or the two middle letters of a word, in order to form another word. The word "notarikon" is borrowed from the Greek language (νοταρικόν), and was derived from the Latin word "notarius" meaning "shorthand writer."
In mathematical logic, a tautology is a formula or assertion that is true in every possible interpretation. An example is "x=y or x≠y". Similarly, "either the ball is green, or the ball is not green" is always true, regardless of the colour of the ball.
In common usage and linguistics, concision is a communication principle of eliminating redundancy, generally achieved by using as few words as possible in a sentence, while preserving its meaning. More generally, it is achieved through the omission of parts that impart information that was already given, that is obvious or that is irrelevant. Outside of linguistics, a message may be similarly "dense" in other forms of communication.
RSVP is an initialism derived from the French phrase Répondez s'il vous plaît, literally meaning "Respond, if it pleases you", or just "Please respond", to require confirmation of an invitation. The initialism "RSVP" is no longer used much in France, where it is considered formal and old-fashioned. In France, it is now more common to use "Réponse attendue avant le ...", meaning "[Your] answer is expected before ...". In addition, the French initialism "SVP" is frequently used to represent "S'il vous plaît" ("Please").
In literary criticism and rhetoric, a tautology is a statement that repeats an idea, using near-synonymous morphemes, words or phrases, effectively "saying the same thing twice". Tautology and pleonasm are not consistently differentiated in literature. Like pleonasm, tautology is often considered a fault of style when unintentional. Intentional repetition may emphasize a thought or help the listener or reader understand a point. Sometimes logical tautologies like "Boys will be boys" are conflated with language tautologies, but a language tautology is not inherently true, while a logical tautology always is.
A battle royale game is an online multiplayer video game genre that blends last-man-standing gameplay with the survival, exploration and scavenging elements of a survival game. Battle royale games involve dozens to hundreds of players, who start with minimal equipment and then must eliminate all other opponents while avoiding being trapped outside a shrinking "safe area", with the winner being the last player or team alive.
PUBG Mobile is a free-to-play battle royale video game developed by LightSpeed & Quantum Studio, a division of Tencent Games. It is a mobile game adaptation of PUBG: Battlegrounds. It was initially released for Android and iOS on 19 March 2018.
