Truly Horrible Acronyms

Computer scientists, computer marketing professionals, and other geeks are fond of coming up with acronyms for products/technologies. Some of the acronyms used are clever, some are boring. And some are truly horrible - either being difficult to pronounce, utterly contrived, or both.

No fair putting BackroNyms on the list - or if you do, identify them as such.

Some of the worst:

• PCMCIA (Personal Computer Manufacturers Cannot Invent Acronyms, er, Personal Computer Memory Card International Association). When it was just a trade association, it was less of a problem. When it became the name for those slots on your laptop, big problem. Unpronounceable (other than to recite the letters), and doesn't stand for anything useful (other than the name or the organization that promoted it). Also known as People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms, or for an added bit of quirkiness and irony, People Can't Remember Computer Industry Acronyms.

  • I pronounce it as "pick-mick-ee-uh" on occasion, just because I'm weird like that. ::grin:: -- CodyBoisclair
  • Before digging out the proper meaning, the best I came up with was Pulse Code Modulated Central Intelligence Agency.

• Captcha. http://www.captcha.net/ Completely Automated Programmable Turing-test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Refers to those UI widgets (CaptchaTests) designed to detect and foil bots, where a picture of a word is displayed, along with various image-processing tricks to fool OCR algorithms, and the user has to type the word into the box. The idea is useful; the acronym is truly terrible. Not easily pronounced, and what it stands for is unbelievably contrived.

  • Huh? take 'gotcha' and replace 'go' with 'cap' and you have it! Pretty easily pronounceable to me. You can also think of 'capture', I believe it's fairly obvious how to pronounce capture as captcha. As to being an "unbelievably contrived" acronym - that's probably to make it easily pronounceable!
    • I subscribe to that, being a German I was associating Caps and gotcha and "that's how we gotcha you BOT!" But, if that is really an acronym, what does it mean spelled out? --ManorainjanHolzapfel
    • As stated above, it means Completely Automated Programmable Turing-test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.

• InterCal. An acronym for "Computer Language With No Pronounceable Acronym". Don't ask. :)

• GNU. It stands for "GNU's Not Unix!" It is extremely annoying to pronounce, and it shares a name with the wildebeest.

  • A good portion of common open-source tools sound like slang or terms for puke, snot, or medical conditions. I'm just the messenger: Grep, GIMP, PostgreSql, Vuze, Ogg Vorbis, Troff (gesundheit) etc. I wonder if such names give tools "geek cred" by making them clearly "un-suit-like". FutureOpenSourceToolNames.
  • {Toad and SAP don't sound particularly "suit-like" either, and they're quintessentially commercial.}, Ditto MUMPS.
  • Some think toads are cute. (How many, I don't know.) And SAP came from mostly the German market and may have a different feel in German. Same with Siemens perhaps.
    • SAP in Germany is simply spoken S A P. Nobody says 'sap'. It has a very similar impression in Germany as IBM may have had in USA. SAP is what 'happens' to any given organisation to end any wikiness of any sorts there ;-) And Siemens is simply a half way common family name, not an acronym at all and the sound of reliability rather than innovation. --ManorainjanHolzapfel (My father worked at Siemens railway signalling department)

• I hafta give the OSS Awkward Prize to PostgreSQL (the users' FAQ for which provides an audio file to illustrate the word's pronounciation) and the Oddity Prize to Ogg Vorbis.

Microsoft

• {Worst company name ever. Sounds like a particularly egregious case of erectile dysfunction.},
• Rumor has it Bill's wife named the company the night of their honeymoon.

pdf. PortableDocumentFormat. Just an ugly name! Especially since there was already a 'PDF' (PortableDataFormat) that existed before Adobe's format. PortableDataFormat is the most common 2-dimensional barcode format--you've probably seen it on FedEx delivery stickers or medication containers in hospitals.

Nothing in computer science beats HSTJWSTTP (Hubble Space Telescope - James Webb Space Telescope Transition Plan) No fair bringing in government agencies!

TWAIN. Thing without an interesting name. -- AdamBerger

• That one's not actually an acronym, according to the people that developed the protocol; rather, it was derived from Kipling's "...never the twain shall meet". Though the backronym is a rather amusing one, I must admit! -- CodyBoisclair
• "Technology Without An Interesting Name", if I remember correctly. I saw it when setting up my scanner a few years back. Now, they all have interesting names like HP SuperDuperScan 1.5 version Hilda.

How 'bout THA? ;-)

WWW. Takes three times as long to pronounce as what it stands for. Any acronym containing a W ought to be pronounceable as a word.

• I've heard "dub-dub-dub" on a few occasions. And one Internet radio station I listened to a while back pronounced it "double-U's", assuming the listener would know that there should be three of them. Then there's the rather facetious suggestion, "sextuple-U"... -- CodyBoisclair
• I've often heard it as "triple-double-U".
• In Dutch, German and Swedish WWW is pronounced ve ve ve, which is quite quick...
• I tend to pronounce it "wuh," but this has yet to catch on.
• Also heard it as "wawawiwa", which is horrible in its own right.
• Is this finally a legitimate use for "wibble"?
• the infernal problem here is no standard or recommendation backs "WWW". WebMasters could break this bad habit by aliasing their next server to "web.foo.org". Also see http://no-www.org/
• At least it's easy to type.

SECS - Semiconductor Equipment Communication Standard

• a wire protocol to transfer data and control packets into semiconductor fabrication furnaces
• you can tell that was an acronym invented by a committee of white males, huh?
• it made discussing furnace controllers with members of the opposite SECS very uncomfortable!
• fortunately its successor, GEM, is more polite

TCP/IP. Transmission Control Protocol over Internet Protocol. Any acronym which contains punctuation (not counting optional periods between letters) is dubious. This one is terrible. Plus, it is frequently ambiguous/incorrect, as other applications of IP (such as UDP or raw sockets) which don't involve TCP are frequently brought under the TCP/IP umbrella.

• Plus, IP is overloaded - Internet Protocol or Intellectual Property?
• And while not the fault of the acronym; how often does one hear "ethernet" being used as a synonym for IP networks in general (regardless of the underlying medium)?

THE. TheHumaneEnvironment. "I like THE". "The what ?". I'm reminded of that DilBert strip where he finds himself working on something called "TTP", which stands for "The TTP Project"... Hey, I used to work for a company by that name!

• Probably why they renamed the project Archie.
• I bet it never showed up in search engines.

ASCII - Sounds like a protologist security tool

ASS - AppleScript Studio, happily defunct

C# - Punctuation confuses indexers and topic organizers. More correctly spelled "C♯".

How about WikiZens' own horrible contributions? I know it's a BackroNym, but I once codenamed a project as Turnip, which I later expanded to mean Timing Utility for Remote Network Investigative Purposes -- EarleMartin

I tried quite hard to get one of our review panels renamed the Change Rollout Approval Panel. I would have accepted Change Rollout Approval Board, too, especially as it rarely resulted in us moving forward! -- PaulHudson

I'm guilty of some bad ones with my current company's intranet system, which has gone through many interpretations of the system's acronym. The most polite (generally reserved for demos of the system to clients, new employees, etc.) is "Business Functionality Portal." As of this writing, it's the "Blatantly Frivolous Portal." The original code-name for the project when I started it was the Big Fricken Portal, a tribute to the BFG weapon from Doom. -- MikeLewis

That's nothing. My company uses a Time Performance System. I turn in TpsReports every two weeks.

There is a Secure Command And Telecommand System in a project for the UK government.

This one is in Portuguese, for my university's administrative council. The acronym for "Conselho Universit�rio' is CO... You really need to understand Portuguese to know why...

Don't forget South Lake Union Trolley in Seattle!

How about some good acronyms? I built some ATE for testing modems back in the 80's. Called the design Modem Automated Test Table, so that I could use MATT as a simple, one-syllable name for a rather complex collection of IEEE-488 gear and software.

CategoryAcronym