The Internet Acronym Server

This is not Google. If you want to search the web, try

Got a new acronym to tell us about? Use our form.

History and references

The origins of acronyms are a little unclear, but their widespread use in daily life is a relatively modern phenomenon and the result of growing literacy in the 19th and 20th centuries. In more restricted circumstances, however, they have been in use for thousands of years (both the Roman and Hebrew cultures used them).

There is a shortage of good articles on the web about the history and development of acronyms: the best is probably at WikiPedia.

There is also an unimaginable quantity of garbage put out by the ignorant, some of which is now rightly being exposed as Urban Myth (see example). Both Britain and North America seem to generate an unusual amount of completely spurious meanings which gain currency in certain circles until they aquire the status of semi-myth, and belief in them is as widespread as it is misplaced.

As a footnote to all this, we began serving acronyms to the Internet in late 1987, with an email interface (you sent email with a request and got back the answer). In 1991 we moved the service to the web, although the email interface continued in parallel until 1996. In 1997 we introduced a submission form and were soon overwhelmed by faked entries, false data, and general abuse. In 1999 we suspended the submissions and reverted to a simple plaintext interface. In 2005 the service moved to a new server and a heavily-revised submission form was reintroduced as an experiment.