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Today in the style wiki we are dealing with a phenomenon that is gaining in importance in times when you have everything but no time.
The abbreviations. Or more precisely: With the noble variant of the abbreviations, the acronyms. Especially in the world of books there are quite a few and in general - if you start looking, you are quickly surrounded by abbreviations and acronyms.

The acronym in brief

An acronym is a short word that is also spoken in abbreviated form and is mostly made up of the first letters of several words, eg VLB for index of books that can be delivered. Even terms formed from the initial syllables are still accepted as acronyms by some scholars, something like WuLi for wish list.

The acronym considered in more detail

Language fans will be able to tell: the term acronym comes from ancient Greek. ákros means tip and ònoma something like designation, name. An acronym is the tip of a designation and thus describes the stylistic device quite aptly.

Acronyms are equally useful for those who are lazy about speaking and typing and have therefore always been just as popular in colloquial language as they are in technical jargon. However, the Internet has made this even more evident, and terms such as LOL have long since been found in spoken language.

For those who want to know exactly, we still have them

Types of Acronyms

• Classic acronyms that are spelled with the first letters instead of pronounced: FBM and LBM
• Acronyms that are spoken and heard like a word and are therefore no longer recognizable as an abbreviation: SuB or NaNo
  If these letter combinations also make sense, we speak of This is the case with Erasmus, for example. E u r opean community action s cheme for the mobility of univer sity students refers to the EU exchange program of the universities.
  Sometimes such a meaning is also assumed the other way around, mostly jokingly, as with TEAM (great, someone else does it). Those are backronyms
• Acronyms that treat letters as syllables: ASAP
• and finally hybrid forms of initial and syllable formation, such as NaNoWriMoor
• Sometimes you no longer even know that a term was originally an abbreviation because it has become so common that it is no longer noticeable.
  Or did you know that Radarstands for Radio Detection and Ranging and is actually also an acronym?

Bonus Knowledge (Smartass Mode)

If the abbreviation of the acronym was actually a personal name, one also speaks of eponyms, such as IKEA or HARIBO. This is more often the case with company names that like to remind people of their founder. There are also some eponyms in literature:
Baedecker, Brockhaus and Duden are named after their spiritual fathers and are also written down eponymously in Braille or Sütterlin. And we swear this isn't a corruption, also named after its inventor.

And when the subject that the person excelled with has an impact beyond the person, it becomes a deonym. A well-known example from literature is sadism. It is named after the notes of the Marquis de Sade, whose eponymous books are erotic classics.

Incidentally, it is no different with masochism, which is named after Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. In his Venus in Furs (1870) he describes in great detail a contractually regulated and theatrically staged behavior of pain and submission in a relationship with a woman. (see also helpful as always Wikipedia *)

And soon we will present you with detailed abbreviations and transfers from the book world.

Stay skouty.