Hi, in ‘Business Basics’ by Oxford University Press, there is an exercise that lists Inc. as an abbreviation. Isn’t it an acronym?
Many thanks,
Torsten[YSaerTTEW443543]
TOEIC listening, photographs: A happy family[YSaerTTEW443543]
No, it is an abbreviation of “incorporated”.
“Inc.” is an abbreviation for “incorporated”, not an acronym, because it doesn’t involve the use of initial letters or syllables.
“IBM”, “USA”, “UNESCO” and words like that are acronyms, but technically they’re initialisms. There’s some esoteric difference between an acronym and an initialism that doesn’t matter to most English speakers.
To me, Inc. is not just an abbreviation because you don’t pronounce it as single letters but rather than a word. In a certain way, Inc. is a bit like ‘ad’ or 'advert.
By the way, according to Wikipedia ‘Inc.’ stands for ‘Incorporation’ not for ‘incorporated’.[YSaerTTEW443543]
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If you’re referring to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inc. , I don’t think it’s actually saying that “Inc.” stands for “Incorporation”. I think it’s just linking to the relevant article, which is called “Incorporation (business)” since article titles are normally nouns. It does look a bit confusing though…
It is an abbreviation precisely because you don’t pronounce it as single letters. If you did, it would be an acronym.
I think you’re confused about the meaning of abbreviation, Torsten.
Is that what you meant to say? As I understand it, the key thing about acronyms is that they are pronounced as words, not as single letters. (Even so, and even if “Inc.” is pronounced like “ink”, I definitely would not call it an acronym since it does not constitute a “new word”.)
Hi Jamie,
What do you call the following:
CIA, FBI, E.T., JFK.
It seems you are confused about the meaning of acronym. An acronym is a word. Here a few examples of acronyms:
Pronounced as a word, containing only initial letters:
AIDS: acquired immune deficiency syndrome
NATO: North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Scuba: self-contained underwater breathing apparatus
Laser: Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation
Pronounced as a word, containing non-initial letters:
Amphetamine: alpha-methyl-phenethylamine
Gestapo: Geheime Staatspolizei (secret state police)
Interpol: International Criminal Police Organization
Nabisco: National Biscuit Company
Pronounced as a word, containing a mixture of initial and non-initial letters
Necco: New England Confectionery Company
Radar: radio detection and ranging[YSaerTTEW443543]
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The examples you give are initialisms not pronounced as words, but the majority of people call them acronyms. Even if the definitions in some dictionaries say that to be an acronym the initialism has to be pronounced as a word, in actual practice nearly nobody knows this, so people refer to any initialism as an “acronym” and people call the ones pronounced as words as “an acronym pronounced as a word”.
So in the parlance of most English speakers, CIA, FBI and E.T. are “acronyms”, even though they’re not pronounced as words. The last one, JFK, would be called “President Kennedy’s initials”. A person’s initials are not referred to as an acronym.
“Inc.” is an abbreviation, but it cannot be an acronym either in the strict sense or in the common understanding of the term, because it does not consist of the initial letters or syllables of two or more words. Secondly, “Inc.” is pronounced as “ink” only in slang, and in standard English it is pronounced “incorporated”, so it doesn’t fit anyone’s definition of acronym.
Why would the authors of Business Basics list ‘BA’, ‘CEO’, ‘FBI’, ‘HP’ as abbreviations?
‘IBM’ and ‘USA’ are pronounced as single letters while ‘UNESCO’ is pronounced as word so it should fall into a different category than IBM and USA. According to the following definition, an acronym is a word. If you say, that IBM is an acronym too, then either the following definition is wrong or you don’t distinguish between acronyms that are pronounced as words and acronyms that are pronounced as single letters.
Acronym: A word formed from the initial letters of other words (e.g., radar, laser).[YSaerTTEW443543]
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The reason that the authors of Business Basics call those examples abbreviations is that initialisms and acronyms are also types of abbreviations. What you’re saying is like asserting that just because a frog is called an animal, it can’t also be called an amphibian.
“IBM” and “USA” do fall into a different category than “UNESCO”, but only in the minds of pedants and not in the mind of the general public. At street level, and even at the level of journalism, all three are called “acronyms”, whether that’s correct according to some dictionaries or not. (In fact, all three could be called acronyms according to the Merriam-Webster definition.) This has been true for at least 40 years, so any dictionary that doesn’t acknowledge the change is about half a century behind, at the very least.
I’m reminded of the arguments we got into at my company because the dictionaries still wrote the word database as “data base”. People who actually used databases had been writing “database” for decades, and “data base” had completely disappeared, but proofreaders kept insisting on the outdated authority of the dictionaries.
I would not call CIA, FBI, IBM or USA acronyms, so I suppose that makes me a pedant half a century behind the times… No surprise there…
What would you call those abbreviations, Dozy?[YSaerTTEW443543]
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Here is a good explanation of the various types of abbreviations, Torsten:
I knew that NATO is an acronym without that page, Jamie but thanks anyway.[YSaerTTEW443543]
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But you obviously didn’t know that acronyms were abbreviations, based on the questions you asked.
“Would you call Torsten a German or a European?”
Neither German nor European, just human being ;-)[YSaerTTEW443543]
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