AskOxford: ARBs (acronyms, retronyms, and backronyms)

Acronyms are part of our daily lives, even if we don't always realize when we're using them - we go scuba-diving, see a laser light show, and bemoan the proliferation of quangos. These are all words that are formed from the first letters of other words; for instance, scuba comes from the initials of self-contained underwater breathing apparatus.

Although many acronyms are, rather boringly, names of organizations (NASA), computing terms (BASIC), or financial products (TESSA), some encapsulate new concepts or phenomena in a memorable way. Ever since the yuppies and Nimbys of the 1980s, market researchers and others have been coining snappy (or slightly laboured) terms to describe new social types: recently, we've encountered kippers, who are older offspring who still live at home with their parents (from Kids In Parents' Pockets Eroding Retirement Savings) and neets (young people who are Not in Education, Employment, or Training), while SKI-ing refers to those parents who are Spending their Kids' Inheritance rather than bequeathing it to them in their wills.

But what about backronyms? Also spelled bacronym, this term refers to either an alternative explanation created for an existing acronym or to an acronym-type 'explanation' of an ordinary word, often with a humorous intent. For example, one of the more printable backronyms for spam email is Stupid Pointless Annoying Messages, while rather insulting ones for the army include Aren't Real Men Yet. Reworkings of existing acronyms or abbreviations include Wait Wait Wait (World-Wide Web) and Looking At Source Erases Retina (laser).

In fact, some of the acronyms mentioned above (such as kippers and SKI-ing) could also be regarded as backronyms, as they were created to fit existing words. Whether or not you fancy a career in market research, you could idle away a few minutes inventing some more - how about pews (Physically Exhausted Working Spouses)?

A retronym, on the other hand, isn't a type of acronym at all, but rather a compound word (usually consisting of the original noun preceded by an adjective) that has been created because the first thing the noun referred to has been overtaken by progress and now needs to be differentiated from a newer development. For instance, before the advent of the electric guitar, all guitars were just known as 'guitars' - the compound term acoustic guitar had to be invented (first recorded in 1966 in the Oxford English Dictionary) to differentiate between the electric and non-electric instrument.

Other retronymic compound words include natural language (first recorded in 1960), which was introduced to distinguish human language from artificial languages created for use by computers, and snail mail (dating back to 1983), which was wittily invented to describe the (comparatively slow) real-world postal service as opposed to email.

The word retronym itself was coined by Frank Mankiewicz, an American PR executive and journalist, and has been discussed in several articles by the writer William Safire in the New York Times since the 1980s. With the current pace of technological and social change, more retronymic coinages are bound to crop up, although it may be some time before we need to distinguish distance travel from time travel.