Pseudo-acronym Pseudo-acronym Olanzapine Category="Acronyms"A pseudo-acronym is an apparent acronym or other Abbreviation which doesn't stand for anything, or cannot be officially expanded to some meaning. For instance:

The instant messaging system called ICQ was chosen as a play on the words "I Seek You".
The Black Sabbath song "N.I.B." is merely the word "nib" spelt as an acronym .
Similarly, the song title "A.M.E.R.I.K.A." by Killradio is typographic rather than acronymic.
After DVD's original expansion - "Digital Video Disc" - became inadequate, the DVD Forum decreed in 1999 that DVD stands for nothing at all and is simply three letters , thus making it a pseudo-acronym. (It is however commonly but unofficially retrofitted to the Backronym "Digital Versatile Disc".)
The EFFIE is an Advertising award that appears to be an acronym, but it comes from the word "effectiveness", which is a good measure of an advertisement.

An anti-acronym is an acronym or other Abbreviation which officially stands for something, but pretends not to, such as phrases which Paradoxically deny their own existence. (This is very common among computer programs, especially UNIX programs.) For instance:

JINI is said to stand for "Jini Is Not Initials".
Pine, a common email reader, stands for "Pine Is Not Elm" (Elm is another mail reader).
Wine, a port of windows DLLs to Unix stands for "Wine Is Not an Emulator".
LAME, an MP3 encoder, ironically stands for "Lame Ain't an Mp3 Encoder".
The NMS project originally stood for "Not Matt's Scripts".

Because these are also recursive acronyms - ones where part of the acronym expands to the original acronym - and can thus never be fully expanded, some prefer to refer to recursive acronyms as pseudo-acronyms instead of anti-acronyms.

See also