Title: Initial
Content:   In a written or published work, an initial or drop cap is a letter at the beginning of a word, a chapter, or a paragraph that is larger than the rest of the text. The word is derived from the Latin initialis, which means standing at the beginning. An initial is often several lines in height and in older books or manuscripts are known as "inhabited" initials. Certain important initials, such as the Beatus initial or "B" of Beatus vir... at the opening of Psalm 1 at the start of a vulgate Latin. These specific initials, in an illuminated manuscript, were also called initiums. In the present, the word initial commonly refers to the first letter of any word or name, the latter normally capitalized in English usage and is generally that of a first given name or a middle one or ones.
Title: Acronym
Content:  in an initialism corresponds to one morpheme, that is, one syllable. When the first letter of a syllable has a tone mark or other diacritic, the diacritic may be omitted from the initialism, for example ĐNA or ĐNÁ for Đông Nam Á (Southeast Asia) and LMCA or LMCÂ for Liên minh châu Âu (European Union). The letter "Ư" is often replaced by "W" in initialisms to avoid confusion with "U", for example UBTWMTTQVN or UBTƯMTTQVN for Ủy ban Trung ương Mặt trận Tổ quốc Việt Nam (Central Committee of the Vietnamese Fatherland Front). Initialisms are purely a written convenience, being pronounced the same way as their expansions. As the names of many Vietnamese letters are disyllabic, it would be less convenient to pronounce an initialism by its individual letters. Acronyms pronounced 
Title: Author citation (zoology)
Content:  If the same surname is common to more than one author, initials are sometimes given (for example "A. Agassiz" vs. "L. Agassiz", etc.), but there are no standards concerning this procedure, and not all animal groups / databases use this convention. Although initials are often regarded as useful to disambiguate different persons with the same surname, this does not work in all situations (for example "W. Smith", "C. Pfeiffer", "G. B. Sowerby" and other names occur more than once), and in the examples given in the Code and also the ICZN Official Lists and Indexes, initials are not used.
Title: Acronym
Content:  word, or from only a few key words in a long phrase or name. Less significant words such as in, of, and the are usually dropped (NYT for The New York Times, DMV for Department of Motor Vehicles), but not always (TICA for The International Cat Association, DoJ for Department of Justice). Abbreviations formed from a string of initials and usually pronounced as individual letters (as in FBI from Federal Bureau of Investigation, and e.g. from Latin exempli gratia) are sometimes more specifically called initialisms or alphabetisms. Occasionally, some letter other than the first is chosen, most often when the pronunciation of the name of the letter coincides with the pronunciation of 
Title: Initial
Content:  The initials are morphologically classified: the rubricated letter (red); the epigraphic letter, imitating ancient Roman majuscules; the figurated initial (usually in miniatures); the historiated initial, that gives spatial support to scenes of a narrative character; etc. The initial may sit on the same baseline as the first line of text, at the same margin, as it does here. This is the easiest to typeset on a computer, including in HTML. An example follows (using Lorem ipsum nonsense text): <blockquote style="width:50%;"> L orem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis 
Title: List of German abbreviations
Content:  Democratic Republic. Initialisms are typically found in commercial, government, legal, medical, scientific and technical uses. In German, initialisms retain the grammatical gender of their primary noun. As in English or Latin, German written abbreviations consist of a letter, letters or partial words shortened from a longer word or phrase, such as etc. for et cetera. Acronyms are a type of abbreviation pronounced as a single word, such as Laser. Initialisms are abbreviations in which each initial in the abbreviation is pronounced separately, such as FBI. It is unsettled question in English style guides whether the word acronym can be used to also describe initialisms. This list makes a distinction between the types because of the way German-speakers create, use and pronounce them. 
Title: Military parlance
Content:  The military often use initials and abbreviations of all kinds - partly for security and operational reasons and partly for the simple convenience of their use; like all such things they can be hard to understand for outsiders. A few examples are given below:
Title: Acronym
Content:  In Vietnamese, which has an abundance of compound words, initialisms are very commonly used for both proper and common nouns. Examples include TP.HCM (Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh, Ho Chi Minh City), THPT (trung học phổ thông, high school), CLB (câu lạc bộ, club), CSDL (cơ sở dữ liệu, database), NXB (nhà xuất bản, publisher), ÔBACE (ông bà anh chị em, a general form of address), and CTTĐVN (các Thánh tử đạo Việt Nam, Vietnamese Martyrs). Longer examples include CHXHCNVN (Cộng hòa Xã hội chủ nghĩa Việt Nam, Socialist Republic of Vietnam) and MTDTGPMNVN ( , Viet Cong). Long initialisms have become widespread in legal contexts in Vietnam, for example TTLT-VKSNDTC-TANDTC. It is also common for a writer to coin an ad hoc initialism for repeated use in an article. Each 
Title: Brand
Content: initialism: a name made of initials, such as "UPS" or "IBM" ; descriptive: names that describe a product benefit or function, such as "Whole Foods" or "Toys R' Us" ; alliteration and rhyme: names that are fun to say and which stick in the mind, such as "Reese's Pieces" or "Dunkin' Donuts" ; evocative: names that can evoke a vivid image, such as "Amazon" or "Crest" ; neologisms: completely made-up words, such as "Wii" or "Häagen-Dazs" ; foreign word: adoption of a word from another language, such as "Volvo" or "Samsung" ; founders' names: using the names of real people, (especially a founder's surname), such as "Hewlett-Packard", "Dell", "Disney", "Stussy" or "Mars" ; geography: naming for regions and landmarks, such as "Cisco" or "Fuji Film" ; personification: taking names from myths, such as "Nike"; or from the minds of ad execs, such as "Betty Crocker" ; 
Title: IJ (digraph)
Content:  When words or (first) names are shortened to their initials, in the Netherlands a word or proper name starting with IJ is abbreviated to IJ. For example, IJsbrand Eises Ypma is shortened to ''IJ. E. Ypma''. Note that the digraph "ei" in "Eises", like other digraphs in Dutch, is shortened to one letter.

Question: what do you call initials that stand for something?
Answer: acronym.
An acronym.