Talk:Three-letter acronym

message: Please add any current discussions only to:
* Talk:TLA to discuss the current disambiguation page
* Talk:Three letter acronym to discuss that page and related issues.  PamD 12:13, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Please add any current discussions 

message: i love the TLA list, and would like it to be even better:  can someone please write a bot that goes thru the entire list, goes to each page, and adds a category tag to each page?  many if not most of them do not refer back to the master TLA page.  if they did, people who randomly hit a TLA entry of one sort or another would be more likely to discover the joy of the master TLA page, in all it's glory! Eupedia 07:02, 1 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Categorization

message: an acronym to describe an acronym?
oh, btw /TLA (three-letter abbreviation or acronym)/ needs to be changed, because that implies all acronyms are TLA's Ilyanep (Talk) 05:15, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Not a silly question.  I would answer yes. --Heron 21:40, 15 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  oh joy 

message: Would C2C be considered a TLA or a "three character acronym/abbreviation" considering the digit contained in it.  I am thinking that providing information around this in the discussion-space of  would be helpful.  I'm interested from the standpoint of my work on Wikipedia:WikiProject Disambiguation.  Thanks. Courtland 01:34, July 23, 2005 (UTC)
:Well, personally, I'd think things like B2B, C2C, etc were TLAs - like debating whether the 'A' stands for 'acronym' or 'abbreviation', I think any distinction misses the point that this is a humourous slang term that refers to the commonness with which things are given 3 character names for snappiness, not some kind of academically accepted linguistic terminology. - IMSoP 13:52, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  TLA or "TCA" 

message: see Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/List_of_all_single-letter-single-digit_combinations where the deletion of all systematic lists of letter combinations is being considered. Courtland 00:23, 1 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  votes for deletion targeting all systematic lists of letter combinations 

message: From the article: "Increasing numbers of TLAs, and other abbreviations, are showing Redundant Acronym Syndrome, in which usually the last of the abbreviated words is added to the TLA (for example, ATM machine, PIN number, HIV virus). Purists recommend avoiding RAS syndrome, especially in formal writing such as technical writing." (emphasis mine) I was reaching for my edit button, but then it seemed like it might have been put in intentionally -- and it seems quite humorous, if one understands the joke. So, is it intentional?
On a somewhat related "putting the material back into Wikipedia" note: the disambiguation page for TLA reads "TLA is a three-letter abbreviation which can mean several things. Most commonly, it literally means three-letter abbreviation or three-letter acronym..." and seems, well, recursive. Recursion n.: see recursion. TheProject 02:34, 19 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It's intentional - RAS syndrome is a distinctly humourous label, deliberately designed to be an example of itself; in a sense, it would actually be incorrect to contract it to just "RAS". In fact, I think I'll rework the sentence to use that form first, rather than piping the link to read "Redundant Acronym Syndrome". - IMSoP 12:06, 19 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  RAS Syndrome 

message: Are either List of TLAs or List of all three letter acronyms needed since this article has a section linking to the TLA's? -Bogsat 14:09, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: List of TLAs and List of all three letter acronyms

message: Does anyone else consider this article masturbatory geek esoterica?  What troubles me is that "TLA" is an unnecessary descriptor; the identification of a TLA is immediately apparent whether the reader understands "TLA" or not.  That is, "TLA" can only add ambiguity.  If I call FAA a "TLA," that adds no additional information if the reader knows what "TLA" means.  If he doesn't, then he's unnecessarily confused and refers to the TLA article.  Upon reading the article, he realizes that TLA is a redundant classification and that he wasted his time looking it up.  So what's the point?  Jargon shouldn't be created for the sake of more jargon.
:[not sure how to indent my reply; however, I agree with this: it's a pure definition of a term, and way more long and rambling than necessary just so that somebody could get in geeky references to GNU, the faux-difference between "abbreviation" and "acronym", and so on] —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 82.113.133.7 (talk • contribs) .
:Me too. This is total bs ("TBS"). For one thing, as the article notes, most three letter "acronyms" aren't even acronyms. So do we have an infinite series of Wikipedia articles about one letter acronyms, two letter acronyms, three letter acronyms and so on, and really list each type? Or do we recognise that this is simply a grammatical construction which isn't a "thing" in itself worthy of a wikipedia article, any more than Fat Ginger Cats or Five-Storeyed Houses. ElectricRay (talk) 09:04, 12 November 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  should just be a wiktionary entry 

message: In total agreement. This is not a topic for an encyclopedia, it is more suited as an entry in "The Annals of Improbable Research" or even "MAD Magazine." There is nothing useful here that would not be better suited for a dictionary entry: i.e., a table of acronyms which is, of course, found in the appendices of large dictionaries. Let's refer it to the Wiktionary
(1) The dating is entirely techno-centric. There were abbreviations used in the ancient world--no one who is affiliated with computers had anything to do with their use. Note: "TLAs" did not become popular in the USA in the New Deal Times. The reason so many abbreviations hit the popular press is that while they were commonly used in Federal Government and Military publications, the influx of all of these programs made it easy for journalists to use just the abbreviation. USA, USS, HMS, UN, POW. . .all were commonly used way before Roosevelt was even born.  
(2) The use of abbreviations does not aid understanding. US Government and Military and the Stylesheets of most newspapers point out that no abbreviation should be used without first spelling it out in text. This excludes, of course, some of the most common abbreviations--such as USA. Many publications dedicated to aid in producing understandable writing suggests they be used with great caution, especially in that a simple substitution of an unintended other abbreviation is likely to lead to massive misunderstanding.
(3) This article is distressingly US-centric. Abbreviations are commonly used in other parts of the world(even parts where there is no readily available and reliable electric sources with which to power computers). One potentially interesting point is the tendency for abbreviations to become names--the map becoming the territory. I have seen it most commonly in Latin America but it probably exists elsewhere. I'm speaking of the situation in which the abbreviation becomes pronounced as a word, and sometimes is used so frequently that the original name is mostly forgotten. The example that comes to mind right now is "INELA" (pronounced in-nell-uh) which is an organization in Bolivia. This is common in the linguistically patched world of the UN as well, where some abbreviations become substituted for the name and migrates across languages so that the spoken word made of initials is used even in languages in which the initial abbreviations wouldn't make sense.
(4) I agree that the difference between "anagram" and "abbreviation"--especially in that we are somewhat missing the mark with our usage of "anagram" here--is a distinction without a difference.
(5) It would thus be more profitable to put efforts into an entry on abbreviations, tracing the way that abbreviations have altered in their relationship to the words being abbreviated, and porting the entire list of anagrams to the dictionary project. The abbreviation article thus would sprout from the entries on semiotics--the study of signs, symbols and the relationships among signifiers, signifieds and sometimes, significants.
Roy 07:22, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Send to dictionary

message: Above the contents, it says FAQ is pronounced as one word. does anybody actually do this? isn't FAQ an initialism?
:I can vouch for my professional community: FAQ is most often pronounced acronymically as "fak". Urhixidur 18:51, 21 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  I've heard it pronounced as Fak in computer science groups but like Sequel (SQL) and other attempts to uncomplicate the jargon you will very often have to explain it again anyway so are better off to just avoid the premature optimisations and communicate more clearly in the first place by using the long form. FAQ can be a pronouncable acronym in groups that use it often enough but it rarely is. -- Horkana (talk) 22:47, 5 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  FAQ acronym vs. initialism 

message: YABA redirects to Yaba, where the only link for "Yet Another Bloody Acronym" points me here. Why's that? I suppose everyone can see that YABA are four, not three letters.
-The preceding signed comment was added by Nazgjunk (talk • contrib) 21:48, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Yet Another Bloody Acronym brings me here :/ 

message: I've seen several pages now that say (as an example) "PDQ is a TLA" with no explanation for what a TLA is without actually clicking on the link... how is this useful? While it's true that one of the great things about Wikipedia is that you can go from page to page and end up somewhere completely different from where you started (and not even mind), using an acronym to indicate that something else is an acronym seems unhelpful at best - I expect information about (thing) to be on the page about (thing) and indeed forcing someone onto another page for information as simple as "This is an acronym" defies that basic principle. Just because you can shorten "three-letter acronym" to TLA doesn't mean you always should. Indeed, in any formal writing, an acronym almost always follows its full text as in "United States of America (USA)". Without the initial referent, the inclusion of only "TLA" is annoying and potentially obfuscating aside.
I'm not going to spearhead any project to change all TLAs into three-letter acronyms, but it's food for thought. I'm interested in other views on this. 128.196.204.224 22:30, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I changed a bunch of disambiguation pages (replacing TLA with three-letter acronym). But you're right, there are an awful lot of them out there. — Loadmaster 23:55, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It is not necessary to change disambiguation pages to read "three-letter acronym" instead of "TLA," as both labels are unnecessary.  Simply saying that the group of letters is an "acronym" is sufficient.  The number of letters in the grouping is obvious to anyone viewing them, and such a distinction would be akin to saying "acronym is a 7-letter word meaning..."  It's unnecessary to have TLA as part of an acronym's disambig page or even to give the number of letters in the acronym listed. -DavidGC 03:45, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  I strongly agree with DavidGC. This fetishism of this term is idiotic.--Ericjs (talk) 05:34, 15 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Usefulness? 

message: Isn't this whole idea pointless?
Where shall it be stopped?
Four-letter acronyms?
Maybe Five!
I have an idea: why not six?
Some people have too much time on their hands. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 194.65.143.156 (talk) 13:24, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Exactly. ElectricRay (talk) 09:05, 12 November 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pointless entry 

message: Could there be an article on this too? I can think of a few but not enough for an article... important ones like FEMA, HUAC and unimportant ones like ATHF and RHCP —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 72.10.240.56 (talk) 20:19, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Four letter acronym? 

message: The claim for a 1982 origin has not been substantiated for more than a year.  I think it should be deleted.  The 1988 example is the earliest which can be substantiated.Chemical Engineer (talk) 22:48, 4 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  History and origins 

message: The quote from Edsger W. Dijkstra is very short and it takes it out of context, where he mocks the use of three letter acronyms and the tendency of corporations to try and trademark them. To make a more detailed quote doesn't seem appropriate so I included the title of the paper ~ the cruelty of teaching computer science ~ to give at least a hint that he might not be talking about a TLA as a good thing. The old reference for the quote was in the form of a PDF that contained an image of handwritten text.  This PDF source was long and was not in any way searchable, strongly discouraging anyone from actually reading the quote in context, so I replaced it with a HTML version of the Dijkstra quote. I encourage other editors to read the quote in it's proper context and make sure that section doesn't get changed in ways that give the quote any more of a dubious context than it already has.  -- Horkana (talk) 22:58, 5 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Edsger W. Dijkstra Quote 

message: This is completely unsubstantiated and in my view non-encylopedic.Chemical Engineer (talk) 10:16, 6 November 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Urban Legend 

message: The April 1 RFC 5513 jokingly suggests the abbreviation "TLA" should be reserved to stand for "Two letter acronym".
210.0.229.224 (talk) 06:19, 10 February 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Two-letter acronyms: IETF RFC example? 

message: The lede, as it is currently written, is confusing and wrong. The first sentence reads like this: "A three-letter acronym, three-letter abbreviation, or TLA is an abbreviation, specifically an acronym, alphabetism, or initialism, consisting of three letters." This implies that acronyms are the same as abbreviations, and I think everyone here knows they are not. Right? (All acronyms are abbreviations, but not all abbreviations are acronyms.) It may be however that the title of the article should be changed, as it really should be "Three letter abbreviation". It really embarrassing for Wikipedia to have such obvious mistakes. 
__209.179.46.67 (talk) 21:30, 14 March 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  The lede needs to be rewritten 

message: The History section states "The exact phrase three-letter acronym appeared in the sociology literature in 1975."  However, it would also be useful to document the first time the full phrase itself was abbreviated to TLA (which itself is a TLA).  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.25.231.219 (talk) 16:19, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  History of "Three-Letter Acronym" being itself abbreviated to TLA. 

message: It would enhance the article to add what they are instead--Backinstadiums (talk) 10:42, 3 February 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  three-letter abbreviations such as etc. and Mrs. are not three-letter acronyms 

message: Is it really useful to have a page about a specific length of acronym? It seems like this should be merged into acronym. 184.21.204.5 (talk) 19:27, 11 December 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: It's funny. And possibly the most unique TLA since it's a TLA. I think that's sufficient reason for its own page. ... is it useful? IDK, but is useful a necessary criteria for having a page? Stevebroshar (talk) 13:23, 21 May 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Is this page useful? 

message: Anyone know how many TLAs are in common use? With and without overloads? That would be interesting. Stevebroshar (talk) 16:27, 21 May 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  How many are there?