initialism
English
Etymology
Pronunciation
- IPA(key): /ɪˈnɪʃəlɪzəm/
Audio (Southern England): (file)
Noun
initialism (plural initialisms)
- (linguistics) A term formed from the initial letters of several words or parts of words, which is itself pronounced letter by letter.
- Synonym: alphabetism
- Hypernyms: acronym (broad sense) < abbreviation (broad sense) < word (broad sense)
- Hyponym: orphan initialism
- Coordinate term: acronym (strict sense)
- The term BBC is an initialism for the British Broadcasting Corporation.
- (linguistics) The process of forming words or terms using initial letters of other words.
- 2015, James Lambert, “Lexicography as a teaching tool: A Hong Kong case study”, in Lan Li, Jamie McKeown, Liming Liu, editors, Dictionaries and corpora: Innovations in reference science. Proceedings of ASIALEX 2015 Hong Kong, Hong Kong: The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, page 146:
- The next most frequent source language was English, with neologistic compounds accounting for 15 etymologies, with 9 other English-based terms from a variety of word formation processes such as initialism and semantic extension.
Usage notes
Derived terms
Translations
term pronounced letter by letter
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See also
Further reading
initialism on Wikipedia.Wikipedia - “initialism”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.
- “initialism”, in Merriam-Webster Online, Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, Inc., 1996–present.
- “initialism, acronym, abbreviation, shortening, abecedism”, in Google Books Ngram Viewer.
Categories:
- English terms suffixed with -ism
- English terms derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *h₂el- (grow)
- English terms derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *h₁ey-
- English terms derived from the Proto-Indo-European word *h₁én
- English 5-syllable words
- English terms with IPA pronunciation
- English terms with audio pronunciation
- English lemmas
- English nouns
- English countable nouns
- en:Linguistics
- English terms with usage examples
- English terms with quotations