The word acronym is made up of terms taken from the Greek language: ἄκρος (read “akhros”) in the sense of extremity, and ὄνομα (read “onoma”) which translates as “name”.
Acronyms are widely used today, especially in the Anglo-Saxon language, and within technical and scientific environments, and are used as independent words from those that gave rise to them.
An acronym is the word that results from the union of two (or more) words, but taking from them, only the initial letters or syllables of one and the last of the other, having the gender of the main word, and its plural is form like any other word. The new term contains in its meaning that of the two words it expresses, and they are not capitalized, for example: from the union of automobile and bus, we obtain the acronym bus, or from the union of "transfers" and "resistor". ” the word transistor arose, or from the union of information and automatic, the word informatics arose.
Other acronyms are acronyms, which are built by taking the initial letters or syllables of several words, writing each of the initial letters in capital letters, for example, the ILO, it becomes a new word that is the acronym for International Labor Organization. Sometimes more letters than the initial are taken to make its pronunciation easier, in this case only the initial letter is written with a capital letter, as is the case with Mercosur, an acronym for the Common Market of the South.
Recursive or recurring acronyms are those that join the initials of two or more words, but whose meaning is capricious and independent of the words that make it up, and whose first letter refers to the acronym itself. They are widely used by computer programmers. For example GNU, is a recursive acronym that means “GNU is not Unix”. It is recursive because GNU reappears in the definition.
To differentiate an acronym from an acronym we must take into account: acronyms only include the first initial letter of the words they comprise. Many times it coincides that the qualification of acronym and acronym are applied to the same word, as is the case, for example, in the cases of UN or OAS, among others, since they can be read as independent words. But when they cannot be read as a word, but each letter is read separately, to include, for example, only consonants, it is an acronym, but not an acronym, as is the case, for example, with LGBT (Movement to fight for equality of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans).