English

edit

Etymology

edit

From initial +‎ -ism.

Pronunciation

edit

Noun

edit

initialism (plural initialisms)

  1. (linguistics) A term formed from the initial letters of several words or parts of words, which is itself pronounced letter by letter.
    Synonym: alphabetism
    The BBC is an initialism for the British Broadcasting Corporation.
  2. (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.

Derived terms

edit

Translations

edit

See also

edit

Further reading

edit
  NODES
innovation 1
Note 1