What Is Initialism?

An initialism is the best word ever. It's a combination of two words you usually don't see together: initial, which means "first," or "beginning," an acronym, which is a word formed from the first letters of other words. It's like an acronym, but instead of being pronounced as a single word, you pronounce it letter by letter. Think about it—an abbreviation is like a sentence made up of only vowels, so it would be pronounced in a way that we would understand if we were to say it aloud. But an initialism? It's like a sentence made up of consonants—which is impossible to pronounce without sounding weird! Initialisms are considered to be speech sounds, and they are often used in place of the words they represent. For example, "UNESCO" is pronounced "you-neh-scoh", and "FBI" is pronounced "eff-bee-eye". There are several benefits to using an initialism over the term it is meant to represent. They are shorter and easier to pronounce, which makes them suitable for use in slogans and taglines. They are easier to remember as they are a series of sounds rather than a collection of words. And they are often considered to be more relaxed or trendier than their full-form counterparts, which is especially important for younger demographics. Initialisms and acronyms are abbreviations, but they're not the same. While an acronym is a word that has been made shorter by using the first letter of each word in a phrase (like NASA), an initialism is just a combination of letters pronounced as a word (like IBM). In most cases, it's easy to tell whether or not something is an acronym or an initialism. If you can spell it out without pausing or putting the letters together, it's probably an acronym. On the other hand, if you have to read it out loud as a single word, it's perhaps an initialism. However, there are some cases where this can get confusing—especially in tech jargon. For example, "RAM" (random access memory) and "HTML" (hypertext markup language) are acronyms because they can be spelled out. But "PC" (personal computer) is an initialism! That's because it's pronounced as one word ("p-c"), not two separate letters ("pee-see")