TLA TLA The Center Category="Abbreviations"
For other uses, see TLA (disambiguation).

The TLA (three-letter acronym or three-letter abbreviation) is the most popular type of Abbreviation in technical terminology, and is also very common in general language. While three-letter acronym is the older and more frequently cited term, many argue that use of the word acronym is incorrect (see Acronym and initialism), and this has led to the increasing use of the word abbreviation as opposed to acronym in expanding the term. Since TLA can also stand for "two-letter acronym", it is ambiguous. The 3LA abbreviation or the term Trigram can be used instead.

Background

TLA is a three-letter abbreviation itself; the term was almost certainly coined with a certain degree of Self-referential humor in mind. Likewise, the following four-letter combinations are sometimes used for four-letter abbreviations:

Interestingly enough, one can also encounter the variants:

However, all of those forms are far less common than TLA. In the same vein, VLFLA is a very long five-letter abbreviation and DETLA is a doubly-extended three letter abbreviation.

TLAs became common in the United States during the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (who is frequently referred to as FDR). Terms from this period included NRA for National Recovery Administration, CCC for the Civilian Conservation Corps, and TVA for the Tennessee Valley Authority. Detractors of President Roosevelt's policies called the new agencies "Alphabet soup."

According to acronyms.com, TLA was coined by Jeff Kelley (John F. Kelley, Ph.D., CPE) who worked at the time at IBM, a company whose name itself was a TLA. Kelley reports vaguely recalling that the date on which he coined the term was around 1985. However, the Google Groups archive has a citation from a Chip Rosenthal of Intel for "Three-letter acronym" antedated to September 18, 1984 . At least two references to the term from 1982 can be found on the Google Groups Usenet archive as well, one from net.games.frp and one from a post to net.jokes entitled The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Net.

Description

Using only upper-case letters and ignoring diacriticals, there are 26³ = 17,576 possible three-letter abbreviations, and probably most of them are already used in some context. If numbers, special characters, or case-sensitivity are allowed, even more TLAs can be created.

Many TLAs have more than one meaning: TLA itself is also a TLA for the Theater of the Living Arts among other things. There are many TLAs with more than 10 meanings (for example, SDI has at least 36 meanings in the English language). Furthermore, many abbreviations have more than one expansion with the same meaning. For example, GCC first represented GNU C Compiler, but was later changed to mean GNU Compiler Collection (see also Backronym).

In the MS-DOS operating system for personal computers, because only three-letter file extensions (usually denoting the file type) were allowed, many longer abbreviations were shortened to three letters (for example JPEG to JPG, HTML to HTM), and many of these are still used. DOS itself is a TLA for Disk Operating System, although Microsoft have since changed their meaning of the term to Desktop Operating System.

Many abbreviations, some of them TLAs, come from the shortened names of Usenet groups. For example, PRA for pl.rec.anime, or AFU for Alt.folklore.urban.

Sometimes when a TLA involves words that begin with "ex" they are often represented as an "X" in the abbreviation.

Usage

TLAs are typically pronounced as initialisms (e.g., Tee Ell Ay) and written in all capital letters. Some, however are acronyms, and are pronounced as words (e.g., RAM). TLAs are Pluralized by adding s (as in TLAs). The Possessive is formed by adding Apostrophe s (as in TLA's). TLAs are particularly prone to RAS syndrome ("Redundant Acronym Syndrome syndrome"), in which one of the abbreviated words (usually the last) is added alongside the abbreviation itself - as in "ATM machine", "PIN number", and "HIV virus". Purists recommend avoiding RAS syndrome, especially in formal writing such as technical writing.

Common categories of TLAs

A significant number of TLAs come from various codes:

Lists of TLAs

See also

External links