TLA
The
TLA (
three-letter abbreviation or
acronym) is the most popular type of
abbreviation in computing and telecom terminology and
Internet slang, and is also common in political jargon. Some of these, such as "
DOS", are strict
acronyms, while others, like "TLA" itself, are initialisms; this distinction is not universally accepted (see the latter article for a discussion), but leads to the use of
abbreviation as opposed to
acronym in expanding the term.
Background
"TLA" is, of course, a TLA itself; the term was almost certainly coined with a certain degree of self-referential humor in mind. Likewise, a four-letter abbreviation (e.g., VERA) is sometimes known as an ETLA (Extended TLA) or a TLA/E (TLA/Extended). Both terms are of the same humor: the word "ETLA" is an ETLA. In the same vein, DETLA is a doubly-extended three letter acronym, although is heard less.
TLAs became common in the United States during the New Deal of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (who was, and still is, himself often referred to as "FDR"). Terms from this period included NRA for National Recovery Administration, and TVA for the Tennessee Valley Authority. Detractors of President Roosevelt's policies called the new agencies "alphabet soup."
Description
Using only upper-case letters, there are 26³ = 17576 possible three-letter abbreviations, and probably most of them are already used in some context. If numbers, special characters, or case-sensitivity are allowed, even more TLAs can be created.
Many TLAs have more than one meaning: TLA itself is also a TLA for the Theatre of the Living Arts. There are many TLAs with more than 10 meanings (for example, SDI has at least 32 meanings in the English language). Furthermore, many abbreviations have more than one expansion with the same meaning. For example GCC was first 'GNU C Compiler', and later 'GNU Compiler Collection'. (See also backronym.)
In the MS-DOS operating system for personal computers, because only three-letter file extensions (usually denoting the file type) were allowed, many longer abbreviations were shortened to three letters (for example JPEG to JPG, HTML to HTM). Many abbreviations, some of them TLAs, come from the shortened names of Usenet groups. For example pra for pl.rec.anime.
Common categories of TLAs
\n* household: PVC, PET\n* corporations: BBC, CNN, IBM, DEC\n* time zones: GMT, UTC, DST\n* sports: NFL, NBA, MLB\n* individuals: JFK, LBJ, GWB, FDR\n* politics: NGO, GOP, DNC, NDP, ANC, PAC\n* government: the American DOD, DOE, HUD, IRS, CIA, the British CPS, MOD, MI5, MI6, SIS\n* military: SAS, APC, POW\n* paramilitary: PLO, ETA, IRA, ASU of the IRA, various Northern Irish Loyalist groups, the Colombian left-wing ELN \n* medicine: AAA, MRI, TOE\n* drugs: THC, XTC\n* computers\n** file types: PNG, GIF, PDF\n** hardware: CPU, FPU, RAM, ROM\n** software: GCC, GTK\n** software licences: GPL, MPL\n** operating systems: GNU, BSD, DOS\n** programming languages: AWK, PHP, SQL\n** communications protocols: FTP, IRC, TCP
A significant number of TLAs come from various codes:\n* IATA airport codes: SFO, MSQ, NGO (see Lists of TLAs, below)\n* ISO 3166-1 (country codes): USA, SCG, UAE\n* ISO 4217 (currency codes): RUR, USD\n* SIL codess for languages: ENG, FRN, SWD, BQT\n* IOC country codes: FRA, GBR, GER, JAP (see Lists of TLAs)
Lists of TLAs
\n*Table of all possible TLAs from AAA to DZZ\n*Table of all possible TLAs from EAA to HZZ\n*Table of all possible TLAs from IAA to LZZ\n*Table of all possible TLAs from MAA to PZZ\n*Table of all possible TLAs from QAA to TZZ\n*Table of all possible TLAs from UAA to XZZ\n*Table of all possible TLAs from YAA to ZZZ\n*IATA airport codes (which are all TLAs)\n*List of IOC country codes (also all TLAs)
Related articles
\n*List of all two-letter combinations\n*Four-character idiom\n*List of acronyms and initialisms\n*List of computing and IT abbreviations
\n\n\nCategory:TLA
