I’ve been editing for a really long time, and literate for far longer than that, and it was only just today that I learned that while abbreviations like scuba, NATO, and NASA are acronyms, abbreviations like IRS, FBI, and HTML are called initialisms. Acronyms you say as a word, initialisms you say as individual letters.*
I’ve always just called all them shits acronyms.
BOY, IS MY FACE RED.
* So, LOL is an initialism. Very few people say “lowl,” I gather.
Damn, linguistics is complicated. I vote LOL as both acronym and initialism, depending on usage.
