initialism
noun/ɪˈnɪʃəlɪzəm/
Etymology From initial + -ism.
1
Human sciences, Linguistics, Sciences A term formed from the initial letters of several words or parts of words, which is itself pronounced letter by letter.
- The term BBC is an initialism for the British Broadcasting Corporation.
2
Human sciences, Linguistics, Sciences The process of forming words or terms using initial letters of other words.
- 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.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:
- Derived terms
- orphan initialism
- Related terms
- abbreviation, abecedism, acronym, TLA