Summary

There appears to be a lot of confusion over the correct use of abbreviations and acronyms. In this article, Pamela Berman investigates the difference between abbreviations and acronyms, with a view to helping content developers create structurally correct markup.

Author: Pamela Berman

Contents

A Brief History of the Internet

In 1957, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) launched Sputnik. Most of the world was amazed. The United States (US) military, however, was alarmed. About a year later, the US Department of Defense (DoD) created the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to establish the US lead in science and technology as it applies to the US military. A task force was initiated to create an ARPA plan. The DoD gathered the brightest minds of the time from several fields of study.

By 1966, the ARPA plan was in place. In 1968, the DoD put out a Request for Quotation (RFQ) to build the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET). The University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) was awarded the Network Center Measurement (NCM) contract. In 1969, ARPANET was commissioned by the DoD to research into networking. The network started out with four nodes. When the first packets were sent, the system crashed and thus began the experiment that evolved into what we know today as the Internet.

It is interesting to note that the World Wide Web (WWW), which is also called the "Web", was developed by Tim Berners-Lee as a separate project to reference networked documents and allow the linking of information from one document to another at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). "CERN" comes from the French abbreviation of "Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire". The Web is an Internet-based communication service. An excellent explanation regarding the difference between the Internet and the WWW can be found on the CERN Web site.

The Internet and the Web have evolved from organization-specific projects into a global collaborative effort. Successful projects require effective project management, team members invested in a common goal, and a set of standards for everyone to follow. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is the organization responsible for the evolution and overall project management of the Internet and the WWW. The standards for the Internet are the responsibility of the Institute for Electronic and Electrical Engineers (IEEE), which oversees the hardware and software that support the Web. Standards for the content found on the Web are the responsibility of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

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The Proper Use of abbr and acronym

Because the proper use of abbr and acronym relates to content found on the Web, we should refer to the guidelines as specified by the W3C. According to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0, checkpoint 4.2 instructs us to Specify the expansion of each abbreviation or acronym in a document where it first occurs.

The next step is to determine if a shortened word or phrase is an abbreviation or an acronym. If we look at the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) techniques for acronyms and abbreviations, we find an example for marking up <abbr title="World Wide Web">WWW</abbr>. What is this? It seems to be marked up as <acronym title="World Wide Web">WWW</acronym>. Oh dear, I seemed to have marked mine incorrectly. Or have I?

If we look at the HTML 4.01 Specification: recommendation 9.2.1 for phrase elements of structured text, we find the following:

The ABBR and ACRONYM elements allow authors to clearly indicate occurrences of abbreviations and acronyms. Western languages make extensive use of acronyms such as "GmbH", "NATO", and "F.B.I.", as well as abbreviations like "M.", "Inc.", "et al.", "etc.". Both Chinese and Japanese use analogous abbreviation mechanisms, wherein a long name is referred to subsequently with a subset of the Han characters from the original occurrence. Marking up these constructs provides useful information to user agents and tools such as spell checkers, speech synthesizers, translation systems and search-engine indexers.

Reading a little further, we find an example for marking up <acronym title="World Wide Web">WWW</acronym> as <abbr title="World Wide Web">WWW</abbr>. This creates a bit of a quandary. Which one is correct? Which one should we use? How can we clearly indicate occurrences of abbreviations and acronyms if we clearly have no idea which is which?

In digging a little further, we can see on slide 41 of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Web Content Accessibility Curriculum: Copyright 2000 the following examples:

From this slide we might deduce that initialisms are considered acronyms and shortened words are considered abbreviations. This seems pretty clear, but there still seems to be confusion. Maybe people are using different definitions for abbreviation and acronym. This is entirely possible as W3C working groups involve a global collaborative effort.

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Abbreviation and Acronym Defined

Merriam-Webster provides the following definition for an abbreviation:

A shortened form of a written word or phrase used in place of the whole <amt is an abbreviation for amount>

Merriam-Webster provides the following definition for an acronym:

A word (as NATO, radar, or snafu) formed from the initial letter or letters of each of the successive parts or major parts of a compound term; also : an abbreviation (as FBI) formed from initial letters : INITIALISM

These definitions appear to match the example as laid out on slide 41 of the WAI Web Content Accessibility Curriculum: Copyright 2000.

Freesearch from Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary © Cambridge University Press 2003 provides the following definition for an abbreviation:

'ITV' is the abbreviation for 'Independent Television'.

Freesearch from Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary © Cambridge University Press 2003 provides the following definition for acronym:

an abbreviation consisting of the first letters of each word in the name of something, pronounced as a word: - AIDS is an acronym for 'Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome'.

Now, we are getting somewhere. We have found a discrepancy between the definitions. This seems to be a sticking point for many developers and is illustrated in the article and discussion list, "HTML is not an acronym...". Debate on this issue has been raging since the 8th of August, 2002 so it is safe to assume the confusion surrounding abbreviation and acronym is not something new.

Maybe there is a difference between American English and British English. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000 as listed on Bartleby.com defines acronym as:

A word formed from the initial letters of a name, such as WAC for Women's Army Corps, or by combining initial letters or parts of a series of words, such as radar for radio detecting and ranging.

Okay, we have an American English definition that agrees with a British English definition so this does not appear to be country-specific.

Maybe the problem lies with Merriam-Webster. I found an old print version of Merriam-Webster from 1994. Acronym is defined as, a word (as radar) formed from the initial letter or letters of each of the successive parts or major parts of a compound term. It appears the inclusion of "INITIALISM", in Merriam-Webster's current online definition of acronym, adds an element of uncertainty into the mix. Of course, we could just choose to ignore this definition and hope no one will mention it. It might work; although I personally doubt that will be the case.

The new draft of the WCAG might provide some illumination regarding our dilemma. In the HTML WCAG 2.0 Working Draft, we find editorial notes concerning the use of <abbr> and <acronym> and how to distinguish between the two:

Although these have undergone much discussion, there is not yet enough consensus to create solid techniques.

It seems this truly is a complicated issue; one that will not easily be resolved.

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Now What Do We Do?

I originally had hoped I would find answers during the process of writing this article. It seems I have failed as I have found only more questions:

I have a strong feeling that I am not the only person with questions regarding this issue. As comforting as that is, it does not provide any guidance for a current course of action. Obviously, I could choose to do nothing until it all gets sorted out. Personally, I cannot in good conscience ignore the people for whom I design and develop so I will muddle on, continue searching for guidance, and pray my actions do not muck things up too much for the users now and in the future.

As a final note, I chose to recount a brief history of the Internet at the beginning of this article in order to provide a marked up example of content with numerous abbreviations and acronyms. Is this pedantry gone mad, or does it aid the general readability of a document?

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Resources:

  1. Hobbes' Internet Timeline v8.0: http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/
    • Archive-name: Hobbes' Internet Timeline
    • Version: 8.0
    • Archive-location: http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/
    • Last-updated: 1 January 2005
    • Maintainer: Robert H'obbes' Zakon, timeline@Zakon.org, www.Zakon.org
    • Description: An Internet timeline highlighting some of the key events and technologies that helped shape the Internet as we know it today.
  2. World Wide Web Consortium: http://www.w3.org/
  3. Merriam-Webster: http://www.webster.com/
  4. Freesearch: http://www.freesearch.co.uk/dictionary
  5. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition.© 2000. on Bartleby.com: http://www.bartleby.com/61/
  6. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary, 1994: ISBN 0-87779-911-3
  7. HTML Techniques for WCAG 2.0, W3C Working Draft: http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-WCAG20-HTML-TECHS-20041119/

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Category: Accessibility.

Comments

  1. [abbreviations-acronyms.php#comment1]

    Thank you for a fantastic article, Pam. Abbreviations and acronyms are an area surrounded with confusion at the moment, and hopefully this article will shed some light as to where the confusion arises. Russ Weakley posted a very good summary on the Web Standards Group mailing this week, which is also a good read.

    UK guidelines on using abbreviations and acronyms are much clearer. Acronyms are a subset of abbreviations, and are pronounceable words. If there's any doubt as to whether or not someone would pronounce it as a word, then being marked up as an abbreviation couldn't be incorrect, as acronyms are abbreviations. Of course, there is the issue about Internet Explorer's lack of support for abbreviations, but best practice would be not to produce markup for a specific user-agent if it can be avoided. There are also some innovative work-arounds to try and get Internet Explorer to understand abbreviations, but we're back to adding redundant markup for a specific user-agent.

    Posted by Gez on

  2. [abbreviations-acronyms.php#comment2]

    interesting and thorough...but at the end of the day, i think (personally / IMHO of course) it's pointless to worry too much about which one should be used. there is currently no "semantic crawler" that will get confused if you used acronym rather than abbr, and it should not make a difference to AT...so it's really a matter of consistency (and of course personal pride, elitism, whatever) to pick one you think is most appropriate and stick with it. should you find further down the line that you were wrong (once the gods of semantic markup come to you in a dream and tell you about THE WAY) you can always find/replace or transform via XSLT.

    Posted by patrick h. lauke on

  3. [abbreviations-acronyms.php#comment3]

    Aren't all acronyms abbreviations? It seems to me that the lack of clarity in the spec should lead us to a conservative approach: marking up everything as <abbr>. Also, isn't <abbr> being deprecated in XHTML 2 in favor of <abbr>?

    Posted by Eli Simpson on

  4. [abbreviations-acronyms.php#comment4]

    It makes me smile to read an article with some historic background in it as I am in the habit of doing the same thing. Good show!

    I think by now everyone that has looked into the differences between the abbr and acronym elements has a good understanding of the semantics of each.

    Sigh, if someone would please explain this to Bill Gates we might be able to actually put this information to good use.

    I use acronyms often, with title attributes as they should be -- and wish I could use the abbr element when it is appropriate. In fact, I have a whole subsystem just waiting to flag instances of each, but for now I can only use acronym as we all know IE completely ignores the abbr tag.

    Here's an interesting thought: I wonder what the cost in time and dollars (excuse me Gez, pounds) might be estimated for the effort put into dealing with IE by the developer community?

    Vast, large, and so on leaps to my mind.

    Doug

    Posted by Douglas Clifton on

  5. [abbreviations-acronyms.php#comment5]

    Patrick said:

    it's pointless to worry too much about which one should be used.

    In which case, isn't it pointless having two elements? Choosing the most appropriate element to markup content is in keeping with good practice, and should be commended.

    Patrick said:

    there is currently no "semantic crawler" that will get confused if you used acronym rather than abbr, and it should not make a difference to AT...so it's really a matter of consistency (and of course personal pride, elitism, whatever) to pick one you think is most appropriate and stick with it.

    That's what we're discussing; the most appropriate. Most appropriate does not equate to elitism. Most appropriate involves striving for what you could consider to be the best option. Of course, people's mileage will vary.

    Eli said:

    Aren't all acronyms abbreviations? It seems to me that the lack of clarity in the spec should lead us to a conservative approach: marking up everything as <abbr>

    That's a good point, Eli. All acronyms are abbreviations, so taking the conservative approach is a good option.

    Eli said:

    Also, isn't <acronym> being deprecated in XHTML 2 in favor of <abbr>?

    Yes, but XHTML 2 is in draft, so shouldn't influence how we markup current versions of HTML or XHTML.

    Doug said:

    Here's an interesting thought: I wonder what the cost in time and dollars (excuse me Gez, pounds) might be estimated for the effort put into dealing with IE by the developer community?

    That is an interesting thought, Doug. IE 6 is rapidly becoming like Netscape 4 was when the majority of people decided not to support it. In its day, IE 6 was a good browser. It's currently the weakest of the current crop of browsers that annoyingly has the largest market share. Without the rising popularity of Firefox, I doubt there would be any work on IE 7. I suspect it's to keep a stronghold on the market, so they can leverage everyone to .NET when their next operating system is ready. Maybe I'm just too sceptical, and everything will turn out just great :-)

    Posted by Gez on

  6. [abbreviations-acronyms.php#comment6]

    I think you summed it up nicely Gez with your

    "Acronyms are a subset of abbreviations, and are pronounceable words."

    This also answers the point about why acronyms are there in the first place. They denote that the 'abbreviation' can be read as a word. Whereas those marked up as abbr should either be spelled out, or expanded.

    Maybe they thought that it would come in handy for screen readers, or speech browsers?

    Posted by Rich Pedley on

  7. [abbreviations-acronyms.php#comment7]

    Hi Rich, it's good to see you here *smile*

    Maybe they thought that it would come in handy for screen readers, or speech browsers?

    To be honest, I'm not really sure of the benefit of distinguishing acronyms from other types of abbreviations. Screen readers use lexicon analysis in order to determine whether or not something is pronounceable. I could probably understand the introduction of attributes to differentiate between abbreviations that could maybe force a user agent to spell out a word letter by letter, regardless of whether it can be pronounced, but that arguably belongs to the presentation layer and should be controlled with CSS.

    Of course, content authors can force that behaviour with techniques like separating each character in the abbreviation with a full-stop (period), but it would be nice to have some control over how content is delivered to screen readers.

    Posted by Gez on

  8. [abbreviations-acronyms.php#comment8]

    You are quite welcome, Gez. Thank you, Doug :-)

    Gez said:

    Acronyms are a subset of abbreviations, and are pronounceable words. If there's any doubt as to whether or not someone would pronounce it as a word, then being marked up as an abbreviation couldn't be incorrect, as acronyms are abbreviations. Of course, there is the issue about Internet Explorer's lack of support for abbreviations, but best practice would be not to produce markup for a specific user-agent if it can be avoided.

    I agree with Gez that acronyms are pronounceable words and I have attempted to mark up the article in this manner. I also dislike creating user-agent-specific markup. Unfortunately, some of our projects are deployed in an environment where learners are using only IE. In these instances, we exclusively use <acronym> if it is in the best interests of the learners. On the other hand, Gez has mentioned that although IE does not support <abbr>, it does not necessarily mean that <abbr> is not useful for people using screen reader technology in conjunction with IE. We may be making things more difficult for some learners by choosing to ignore <abbr> as a markup option.

    Recently, Gez sent me a link to the article, "Lower-Literacy Users". Unlike higher-literacy (HL) users, lower-literacy (LL) users do not scan text. LL users must read word for word so they plow the text line by line. This research shows that scrolling breaks LL users' visual concentration. I would be interested to learn how marking up abbreviations and acronyms impacts a LL user. Using markup shortens the text but would the rollover tool tip break a LL user's concentration? Would LL users benefit from having everything spelled out or would that complicate matters causing them to ignore whole chunks of information?

    Posted by Pam on

  9. [abbreviations-acronyms.php#comment9]

    Nice article, Pam. As an Englishman now living in the USA, I've run into this sort of debate quite a lot. I have always marked-up my pages with the following guidelines:

    • Acronyms, initialisms, and recursive acronyms (acronyms which often refer to themselves or other acronyms and abbreviations) are all subsets of abbreviations.
    • Markup all acronyms (including recursive acronyms) with the acronym element.
    • Markup all other subsets of abbreviations with the abbr element.
    • Markup all indeterminate abbreviations (weird stuff like W3C) with the abbr element.

    Personally, I think that the acroynm element should be deprecated, and CSS should be used to differentiate between different flavors of abbreviation, if necessary.

    Posted by Simon Jessey on

  10. [abbreviations-acronyms.php#comment10]

    Acronyms are a subset of abbreviations, and are pronounceable words.

    Which is why I don't agree with the WAI saying that W3C is an acronym - I know the point made in this article backs me up. So, am I missing something?

    Anyway, as seems to be the case with most of the Recommendations, it's down to interpretation. Personally, I generally go along with the quote at the top of my comment.

    Posted by dotjay on

  11. [abbreviations-acronyms.php#comment11]

    An interesting sidenote: Abbreviations are often thought of as a shorthand way of saying something. Example: "DOE" vs. "Department of Energy." However, "WWW" is one of the few TLAs (Three-Letter Abbreviations) that is three times longer to say than the words it replaces! WWW = nine syllables; World Wide Web = three syllables.

    Posted by Dale Wilkins on

  12. [abbreviations-acronyms.php#comment12]

    A sidenote related to the sidenote by Dale Wilkins: in Italy WWW is pronounced "voo-voo-voo", and this is certainly shorter and easier (for an Italian speaker) than World Wide Web, that is pretty difficult for us and often transformed into "Word Wild Web".
    Moreover, voo-voo-voo is perceived as a "pronounceable word", therefore it could be taken as an acronym.

    Posted by Marco Lazzari on

  13. [abbreviations-acronyms.php#comment13]

    It seems to me that acronyms are in the eye of the beholder. It's subjective. In all seriousness, I pronounce HTML "huh tuh mul", which started as a joke many years ago but now is the way I, and most of my staff, pronounce it. If we add PHP ("fup") to a section of the site we "fuppify" it. In internal documents maybe I could, or should, mark it up as an acronym, but I would never impose my acronymical pronunciation on the general public by tagging it as such.


    Following that, all abbreviations, acronyms included, should be semantically marked up as such, we only truly need acronym-aware presentation, it belongs in the style sheet. Unless of course we take this furthr and find a need to mark up nested, recursive acronymical abbreviations such as

    <abbr type="recursive" title="PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor" pron[en-US|en-UK]="fup"><abbr type="recursive" title="Personal Home Page" pron[en-US|en-UK]="fup">P</abbr>HP</abbr>

    Posted by mynameismonkey on

  14. [abbreviations-acronyms.php#comment14]

    lol mynameismonkey *smile* It's also good to see someone who remembers PHP standing for Personal Home Page rather than Pre Hypertext Processor, or the recursive PHP Hypertext Processor.

    Posted by Gez on

  15. [abbreviations-acronyms.php#comment15]

    Good one,pam.I agree with Gez explaining about acronyms which he said as a pronounceable words.But it is difficult for some one to display which he never heard of that.There are some acronyms like.. for GNU which stands for GNU's Not Unix..this is all nothing but crappy things.Also ,for Emacs stands for many things,which is not convenient for all.We may be making things more difficult for some learners by choosing to ignore <abbr> as a markup option.

    Posted by shivaprasad on

  16. [abbreviations-acronyms.php#comment16]

    it's easy... abbreviations are words shortened by particular letters in each word... acronyms are the same thing, only the letters make a speakable word... html is not an acronym (it has no vowels)... nato is (it has vowels)... there is nothing to debate

    Posted by praetorian on

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