TLA

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The three-letter abbreviation or three-letter acronym (TLA) is the most popular type of abbreviation in computing terminology, and is also common in political jargon. Some of these, "DOS" for example, are acronyms. TLA is, of course, a TLA itself; the word was almost certainly coined with a certain degree of self-referential humor in mind.

A four-letter abbreviation (e.g., VERA) is sometimes known as an ETLA (Extended TLA) or TLA/E (TLA/Extended). Both terms are of the same humor: "ETLA" is ETLA.

Using only upper-case letters, there are 263 = 17576 possible three-letter abbreviations, and probably all of them are already used as acronyms in some context. If we allowed numbers, special characters, or case-sensitivity, even more TLAs can be created, many of them already in use.

Many TLAs have more than one meaning. There are even TLAs with more than 10 meanings (for example, SDI has at least 32 meanings in the English language). Many abbreviations have more than one expansion with the same meaning. For example GCC was first 'GNU C Compiler', and later 'GNU Compiler Collection'.

In the DOS operating system for personal computers, because only three-letter file extensions (usually denoting the file type) were allowed, many longer abbreviations were shortened to three letters (for example JPEG to JPG, HTML to HTM).

Many abbreviations come from the shortened names of Usenet groups. For example pra for pl.rec.anime.

Common categories of TLAs:

A significant number of TLAs comes from various codes:

TLAs became common in the United States during the New Deal of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, including NRA for National Recovery Administration, and TVA for the Tennessee Valley Authority. Detractors of President Roosevelt's policies called the new agencies "alphabet soup."


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