🚀 go-pugleaf

But certainly the decomposition of 'acronym' into the Greek 'acr(o)'+'onym' is
straightforward enough.  It means something like 'beginnings-name', or a name
derived from the beginnings of the words which make it up.  Compare 'acropolis'
and 'synonym'.

-Greg

rosalia@cygnus.co.uk wrote:

: > > I'm not too lazy or proud to look it up in a dictionary, but my 13
: > > volume Oxford English Dictionary has no entry for acronym.

: I am very impressed by this whole thread, and I told some of the
: people in the British office I am visiting.  They are very smart and
: culturny, and they explained to me that the first edition of the OED
: (Oxford English Dictionary) was started a very long time ago, and the
: letter 'a' would have been completed before the 1940s.

: So one guy went home and checked in his second edition of the OED,
: which has 26 volumes (!).  It *does* have an entry for ``acronym'',
: and mentions that it the word was invented in the US in the 1940s.

: The etymology is unknown.

: I believe it must stand for something like ``Acronym for Recursively
: Obsessed Northern Yankee Mythologies'' or something like that.

: In other words, someone invented the ultimate acronym: a word that
: describes its own concept, creates its own concept, represents itself,
: and is recursive in the XINU and GNU sense.

: And on top of that the inventor kept it a secret, and probably smiled
: subtly every time a new dictionary covered her (his) special word.

: I wonder who this person is; their email address is probably something
: like acronym@we-run-the-world-in-secret.org