Acronym vs. Initialism

I've noticed an uptake in the use of the word "acronym" in the videos lately, and while acronym is a wonderful word, most of the places it's being used here are actually incorrect, so I thought I'd make a short post explaining the difference between an acronym and an initialism.


Put simply: Acronyms are initialisms, but not all initialisms are acronyms.


An initialism is any set of letters commonly used together, where each letter stands for a word. Examples include SUV, CIA, and (of course) DFTBA.


An acronym is an initialism that you pronounce as a word, such as LASER or RADAR, but sadly not DFTBA.


Unless you start pronouncing it "duft-ba", which now that it's ocurred to me, I think I may actually start doing.