Acronyms that no longer stand for anything   How does one call them Examples are AOL formerly America Online SOAP formerly Simple Object Access Protocol and VLC formerly VideoLAN Client    The Pseudoacronym article asserts these should be called orphan acronyms but the sourcing is pretty weak and smacks of original research    They supposed to be called obsolete acronyms  Source    Isnt this at least partly covered under Usage Case in the para starting Some acronyms undergo assimilation into ordinary words  Interesting question  I worked for a company acquired by GE a little over a year agonamed IDX  It was hard to explain to customers and others that IDX was not an acronym for anything  This may be a onetime situtation but I wonder if there are other pseudo acronyms or false acronyms   How about ISO  Preceding unsigned comment added by      SAT stands for Scholastic Aptitude Test  ISO uses its name in full on all standards it publishes  Preceding unsigned comment added by       ISO is not and never has been an acronym  The two official languages of ISO are English and French in which its full names are the International Organization for Standardization and lOrganisation internationale de normalisation  If it were an acronym Englishspeakers would callit IOS and Frenchspeakers OIN      Who invented the appalling word  if it can be called that  initialism  They should be shot at dawn figuratively of course    It used to be better explained in the articleIm not seeing it now upon quick skimming The word has existed since  as I recall the year cited earlier It predated the coining of the word acronym by  decades It is often used to make a distinction between abbrevs pronounced as a string of initials versus abbrevs pronounced as a word So its not as hideous or neologous as you might imagine      fictional espionage organizations   Theres really no reason that this much of this article should be taken up with a list of fictional espionage organization This seems to be screaming for its own article  Objections     Ive been thinking exactly the same thing  Create an article Fictional espionage organizations move the big list there and add just a note here eg The names of fictional espionage organizations are often acronyms or backronyms      Sounds good Ill split that article out now     Update For interested readers FYI The spunoff article is now called List of fictional espionage organizations     External links   On   May  I deleted the External Links section  On   May  somebody at IP address  added them back in  So I guess theres some disagreement    Heres why I think the EL section s