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Information about Three Letter Abbreviation

A three letter acronym (commonly referred to as a TLA) is an abbreviation, an alphabetism, an initialism or an acronym consisting of three letters.

Many of the abbreviations described as "three letter acronyms" are initialisms, which some definitions of acronym do not include (See acronym and initialism). Nevertheless, "Three letter acronym" is commonly used for any set of three letters used as an abbreviation.

History and origins

The first known use of the term "TLA" was by Texas Instruments Inc. employees in the Industrial Systems Division circa 1984. Engineers used to mock the marketing department's tendency to define new products with three-word descriptions, such as "CVU" for a product line called "Control Vision Unit" and "ACM" for "Automation Configuration Module." Due to the seemingly excessive use of three-letter abbreviations or initialisms at the company, the employees started to simply report that they were working on product "TLA" as an ironic self-reference.

Use of "TLA" spread through both industry and academia, and now has become a generally understood initialism. For a complete discussion of the various forms of abbreviations, acronyms and other letter substitutions, see Acronym and initialism.

Other information

  • Another use of TLA is "three-letter agency", referring to a law enforcement or intelligence agency with a three-letter name abbreviation, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency.
  • The number of possible three-letter abbreviations using the 26 letters of the alphabet from A to Z ( AAA, AAB ... to ZZY, ZZZ) is 26 × 26 × 26 = 17,576. An exhaustive listing of TLAs can be found in .
  • In English, WWW is the longest possible TLA to pronounce, requiring nine syllables. Although in written English it is an abbreviation, in spoken English it may use more syllables than that which it is abbreviating.[1]

References in popular culture

  • As early as 1967, the musical Hair included the song "Initials", whose chorus consisted only of TLAs. Viz: "LBJ IRT USA LSD. LSD LBJ FBI CIA. FBI CIA LSD LBJ."
  • In 1986 Will Shatter of the band Flipper formed a band named "Any Three Initials" (ATI), as a parody of the preponderance of hardcore punk bands with three-initial names.
  • In 1998 the British band Love and Rockets released their last album, Lift, featuring the song "R.I.P. 20 C." that, apart from the refrain, consists only of three-letter abbreviations. A contest was held rewarding the first to correctly give the meanings of all 69 of them.
  • In 1999 German hip-hop group Die Fantastischen Vier (The Fantastic Four) released the song "MfG" ("Mit freundlichen Grüßen" - German for "best regards", literally "with friendly regards"), also mainly consisting of TLAs.[2]
  • In 1999, the author Douglas Adams remarked: "The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it's short for."[3]
  • According to the Jargon File, a journalist once asked hacker Paul Boutin what he thought the biggest problem in computing in the 1990s would be. Paul's straight-faced response was, "There are only 17,000 three-letter acronyms."
  • The Jargon File also mentions the term "ETLA," for "Extended Three-Letter Acronym," to refer to four-letter acronyms/abbreviations.

See also

Footnotes

1. ^ i.e. dou-ble-u dou-ble-u dou-ble-u = 9 syllables, whereas most of the entries on WWW (disambiguation) are pronounced in 3 syllables.
2. ^ Lyrics of "MfG"
3. ^ Douglas Adams, The Independent on Sunday, 1999

External links

TLA is most commonly used as an abbreviation of "three letter acronym" or "three letter abbreviation", but it may also refer to:
  • A "three letter agency", a law enforcement or intelligence agency with a three-letter name abbreviation, such as the Federal Bureau of

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abbreviation (from Latin brevis "short") is a shortened form of a word or phrase. Usually, but not always, it consists of a letter or group of letters taken from the word or phrase. For example, the word "abbreviation" can itself be represented by the abbreviation "abbr.
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Acronyms and initialisms are abbreviations, such as NATO, laser, and IBM, that are formed using the initial letters of words or word parts in a phrase or name.
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Acronyms and initialisms are abbreviations, such as NATO, laser, and IBM, that are formed using the initial letters of words or word parts in a phrase or name.
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Acronyms and initialisms are abbreviations, such as NATO, laser, and IBM, that are formed using the initial letters of words or word parts in a phrase or name.
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Acronyms and initialisms are abbreviations, such as NATO, laser, and IBM, that are formed using the initial letters of words or word parts in a phrase or name.
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Acronyms and initialisms are abbreviations, such as NATO, laser, and IBM, that are formed using the initial letters of words or word parts in a phrase or name.
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Texas Instruments

Public (NYSE:  TXN )
Founded 1930 (as GSI), 1951 (as TI)[1]
Headquarters Dallas, Texas, USA

Key people Tom Engibous, Chairman
Rich Templeton, President & CEO
Kevin March, CFO
Brian Bonner, CIO
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Self-reference is a phenomenon in natural or formal languages consisting of a sentence or formula referring to itself directly, through some intermediate sentence or formula, or by means of some encoding.
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Acronyms and initialisms are abbreviations, such as NATO, laser, and IBM, that are formed using the initial letters of words or word parts in a phrase or name.
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TLA is most commonly used as an abbreviation of "three letter acronym" or "three letter abbreviation", but it may also refer to:
  • A "three letter agency", a law enforcement or intelligence agency with a three-letter name abbreviation, such as the Federal Bureau of

..... Click the link for more information.
Federal Bureau of Investigation

Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity|

Director: Robert S. Mueller III
Deputy Director: John S. Pistole
Department: Justice
Divisions:
  • FBI Academy
  • FBI Laboratory
  • Criminal Justice Information Services

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Central Intelligence Agency

Seal of the Central Intelligence Agency
Agency overview
Formed 26 July, 1947
Preceding Agency Central Intelligence Group

Headquarters Langley, Virginia, United States

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National Security Agency/Central Security Service (NSA/CSS) is the United States government's cryptologic organization that was officially established on November 4, 1952. Responsible for the collection and analysis of foreign communications, it coordinates, directs, and performs
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English}}} 
Writing system: Latin (English variant) 
Official status
Official language of: 53 countries
Regulated by: no official regulation
Language codes
ISO 639-1: en
ISO 639-2: eng
ISO 639-3: eng  
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The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked, hypertext documents that runs over the Internet.

WWW may also refer to:
  • WorldWideWeb, the world's first web browser
  • WWW - The Libwww Line Mode Browser, an early line-mode web browser

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For the computer operating system, see .
A syllable (Ancient Greek: συλλαβή) is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds.
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Hair
The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical

Original Publicity Poster
Music Galt MacDermot
Lyrics James Rado Gerome Ragni
Book James Rado Gerome Ragni

Productions 1967 Off-Broadway
1968 Broadway 1968 West End
1968 Berlin
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Flipper is an influential punk/noise band from San Francisco, California, formed in 1979, continuing on in often erratic fashion until the mid-1990's, then reuniting in 2005. Its founding members included former members of the Sleepers and Negative Trend.
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Love and Rockets were an alternative rock band formed in 1985 by former Bauhaus members Daniel Ash (guitars, saxophone, and vocals), David J (bass and vocals) and Kevin Haskins (drums, synthesizers).
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Lift
(1998)

Lift is the seventh and final album by the British band Love and Rockets, released in 1998 on Red Ant.

Lift overlooked the harder rock of Sweet F.A. in favor of Hot Trip to Heaven's electronic sound.
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Die Fantastischen Vier also known as Fanta 4 is a German hip hop group from Stuttgart, Germany. The members are Michael Bernd Schmidt alias Smudo, Andreas Rieke alias And.
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Douglas Adams

Douglas Adams signing books at ApacheCon 2000
Born: 11 March 1952(1952--)
Cambridge, England
Died: 11 May 2001 (aged 49)
Santa Barbara, California, U.S.
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The Jargon File is a glossary of hacker slang. The original Jargon File was a collection of hacker slang from technical cultures including the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL), and others of the old ARPANET AI/LISP/PDP-10 communities including Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN),
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Paul Boutin (born 1961 in Lewiston, Maine, United States) is a magazine writer and editor who writes about technology in a pop-culture context.[1]

Boutin writes regularly for Slate and Valleywag, and does book reviews for the
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The Jargon File is a glossary of hacker slang. The original Jargon File was a collection of hacker slang from technical cultures including the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL), and others of the old ARPANET AI/LISP/PDP-10 communities including Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN),
..... Click the link for more information.
The term RAS syndrome refers to the use of one of the words that make up an initialism or acronym as well as the abbreviation itself, thus in effect repeating that word. It stands for "Redundant Acronym Syndrome syndrome," and is itself a humorous example of a redundant acronym.
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acronym = an abbreviation pronounced as a series of constituent letters, e.g., SARS = severe acute respiratory syndrome
  • initialism = an abbreviation pronounced wholly or partly using the names of its constituent letters, e.g.
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    • This list of all two-letter combinations includes 1352 (2 × 26²) of the possible 2704 (52²) combinations of upper and lower case from the modern core Latin alphabet. A two-letter combination in bold
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    Slashdot
  • 1GL — First-Generation Programming Language
  • 10B2 — 10 Base2
  • 10B5 — 10 Base5
  • 10B-F — 10 Base-F
  • 10B-FB — 10 Base-FB

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