Three-letter abbreviation

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The three-letter abbreviation (DBA), in English TLA ( three-letter acronym or three-letter abbreviation ), is the most common and popular form of abbreviation in the technical environment and, above all, in English in general usage. In English, the TLA is also used as an abbreviation for two-letter abbreviation (or acronym ), but its establishment in everyday language means that it can usually be assumed to be a three-letter variant.

background

DBA or TLA is already a three-letter abbreviation and is similar to the tradition of the German The abbreviation of abbr. Is abbr. With a humorous background.

DBA also refers to the database administrator .

There are a number of similar terms that are used for long, i. d. As a rule, memorable words or abbreviations resulting in parts of words are used. Similar to DBA and TLA , the terms used for this should be viewed with a certain sense of humor:

  • FLAB ( F our L etter AB breviation) - four- letter abbreviation
  • ETLA or XTLA ( E nhanced or e X tended TLA ) - Extended three-letter abbreviation

The game can go on and on as you like. In general, however, longer abbreviations seem less original and are less well known than DBAs .

In the United States of America , the three-letter abbreviations came into fashion at the time of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (whose name is often abbreviated as FDR ). Names such as NRA for the National Recovery Administration , CCC for the Civilian Conservation Corps or TVA for the Tennessee Valley Authority come from this time . The spread of such abbreviations was also viewed critically.

The exact origin of the abbreviation TLA is no longer fully traceable today. The Internet service acronyms.com attributes the term to Jeff Kelley (John F. Kelley, Ph.D., CPE ), who is said to have coined it during his time at IBM , the name of which is itself a three-letter abbreviation. Kelley thinks she can vaguely remember that this was sometime in 1985. However, the Usenet archive Google Groups cites a quote from Chip Rosenthal from Intel , who predated “Three-letter acronym” to September 18, 1984. At least two mentions of the term from 1982 can also be found on Google Groups Usenet, one in net.games.frp .

However, the term TLA already appears in the English manual of the Sinclair ZX81 home computer published in 1981 (the language was deliberately kept somewhat flippant) . In the explanation of the technical structure, in view of the CPU , RAM , ROM and SCL, the sentence As you can see, everything has got a TLA (three letter abbreviation) (“as you can see, every part has a DBA”).

description

If you only use capital letters and omit umlauts , there are 26³ = 17,576 possible three-letter abbreviations, and most of them have probably already been used at some point in some context. If one or two digits are added (e.g. 4GL , Y2K ), even 36 × 36 × 36 - 10 × 10 × 10 = 45,656 combinations are possible. If you still allow special characters (e.g. P&R ) or lower case (e.g. KfW ), a large number of other three-letter abbreviations can be created, but these no longer correspond to the original idea of ​​the designation DBA .

Many three-letter abbreviations are now used in several meanings, such as B. BMI for the Federal Ministry of the Interior or the body mass index etc.

Dating back to the MS-DOS operating system for IBM - personal computers , have three letters limited file extensions established that were so common that they colloquially to refer to these file types are: AVI or MP3 format are known representatives. It should also be noted that MS-DOS has adopted this so-called 8.3 convention (8 characters for the name, 3 for the extension) from CP / M and this in turn from TOPS-10 . The three-letter abbreviations for filename extensions thus go back to the early 1960s.

use

Three-letter abbreviations are read letter by letter with the appropriate pronunciation, depending on whether they come from the English or German language (e.g. Ei Bi Em for IBM). Those that can be recognized as real acronyms can also be pronounced as words ( RAM , ROM ), in some cases both have become commonplace (e.g. FAQ , DAK ). The users of three-letter abbreviations tend to use redundant acronyms , jokingly called "RAS syndrome" (RAS = Redundant Acronym Syndrome), the phenomenon of appending the last part with a three-letter abbreviation as a pronounced or written word (for example, DIN standard , LCD display , PIN number or HIV virus ).

Common categories of DBAs

A large number of three-letter abbreviations result from standardized codings:

Lists of important three-letter abbreviations

various

Web links