What do you call a word made up of first letters?

What do you call a word made up of first letters?

An acronym is a word or name formed from the initial components of a longer name or phrase, usually using individual initial letters, as in NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) or EU (European Union), but sometimes using syllables, as in Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg), or a mixture of the two, as in …

What is a word made up of other words?

AnagramA word or phrase formed by rearranging the letters of another word or phrase. The English word anagram goes back to 1589. Grambs uses the word transposal in this general sense, and anagram more narrowly to mean a transposal of letters resulting in synonymous term.

What are two words together called?

Portmanteau word, also called blend, a word that results from blending two or more words, or parts of words, such that the portmanteau word expresses some combination of the meaning of its parts. A portmanteau is a suitcase that opens into halves.

Which is formed from the first letter of a word?

“An acronym is a pronounceable word formed from the first letter or letters of a series of other words, such as NATO, CUSO, or NORAD.” “An initialism is formed from the initial letters only of a series of words and may not be pronounceable as a word. Examples are YMCA, OECD, IDRC, and EEC.”

Can a word be formed from the initials of another word?

Unless one is addressing an academic audience, the word acronym may be used to refer to any word formed from the initials of other words. For one thing, acronym is a more familiar term than initialism.

What’s the difference between an abbreviation and a word?

Acronyms, of course, are abbreviations where the abbreviation is formed from letters of other words (usually the first letter of each word, though not always). The part of the definition of acronym that many people miss is that the resulting abbreviation needs to be pronounceable as a word.

What do you call the process of combining two words to create a new one?

In linguistics, a blend word is a word formed from parts of two or more other words. The process is called blending and the result is a blend word . A portmanteau word typically combines both sounds and meanings, as in smog , coined by blending smoke and fog .

What is it called when you take the first letter of each word?

Most people call this an acronym, but there are some subtleties here. “An acronym is a pronounceable word formed from the first letter or letters of a series of other words, such as NATO, CUSO, or NORAD.” “An initialism is formed from the initial letters only of a series of words and may not be pronounceable as a word.

Which is a word formed from the initials of other words?

Unless one is addressing an academic audience, the word acronym may be used to refer to any word formed from the initials of other words. For one thing, acronym is a more familiar term than initialism. For another, many words formed from initials defy easy categorization. Some don’t even have widely agreed-upon names to describe them.

How are words formed from the letters of other words?

“SpEd” is stated as a single word. The acronym for Physical Education is stated as letters: “P.E.” Actually, “P.E.” adds another level of complexity because it is always spelled with periods, unlike many other acronyms that have become part of the English lexicon. For example, “scuba” is no longer spelled “S.C.U.B.A.”

How are abbreviations formed in the English language?

Abbreviations are also formed by omitting one or more syllables from a word. This is sometimes called ‘clipping’, because we keep the beginning of the word and ‘clip’ the rest of the word. The abbreviations here are written and spoken in this form: An initial is the first letter of a word.