"Blog" is a funny word
A couple weeks ago, some friends and I were talking about the word blog and its oddity. Formed by combining web and log, blog is one of the few acronyms in English which combine contiguous parts of two separate words, rather than, say, the initial letter of several words. But as far as I can tell, blog is the only such English-language word.
Thinking more about this, I came up with three main categories of English-language abbreviation words. (You can look most of them up at dictionary.com.)
Initialisms
NATO, GATT, laser, radar, scuba
Truncations
at the start: automobile, condominium, tabloid, carriage
in the middle: refri[d]gerator, influenza
at the end: omnibus, newspaper, airplane, kangaroo
Compounds
web log
And I'm out - all the other words I think might be compound abbreviations are from other languages: SMERSH and Cheka from Russian; Gestapo from German... Are there other such words in English?
Thinking more about this, I came up with three main categories of English-language abbreviation words. (You can look most of them up at dictionary.com.)
Initialisms
NATO, GATT, laser, radar, scuba
Truncations
at the start: automobile, condominium, tabloid, carriage
in the middle: refri[d]gerator, influenza
at the end: omnibus, newspaper, airplane, kangaroo
Compounds
web log
And I'm out - all the other words I think might be compound abbreviations are from other languages: SMERSH and Cheka from Russian; Gestapo from German... Are there other such words in English?
posted by Christopher Tassava at Wednesday, February 16, 2005
3 Comments:
One acronym that I'm fascinated with is GNU. As in, Gnu's Not Unix. It's self-referential! Try as I might, I can't find another self-referential acronym. Anyone?
Google turns up this:
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=recursive%20acronym
Apparently IT folks are funny, as well as funny looking.
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