AcronymFinder.com passes the 1 million definition milestone

I once took stock of the acronyms and abbreviations I had collected and I marveled. I had a list of about 1,000 definitions and they were in a word-processing document that I revised and reprinted periodically for my personal reference. The year was 1986, and I could never have imagined that someday that 40-page document would grow to be a 40,000-page document—1,000 times as large!

On 10 Dec 2010, the new abbreviation definition, MDS, a French abbreviation meaning "Atelier de Mineralisation des Solvants Organiques"—referring to an organic solvent facility—was verified and added to the Acronym Finder database, and, as a result, it has now passed the 1 million definition milestone. I'm amazed all over again. Not just because of the sheer size of the database, but because of the millions of users over the past 14 years the site has been online who have contributed new terms, corrections, and feedback that have made the site what it is today—the most comprehensive resource of its kind that has ever existed.

Less than two years ago, we rolled over 750,000 terms. Thanks to many new editors, we have grown very rapidly in a very short time. But every new term is still carefully reviewed and verified by a trained (and paid) editor. Since then, we've added an average of over 375 new terms every single day! And we're not finished, as we have many thousands more to check, many thousands more contributed each month, and many new acronyms and abbreviations are being invented every day, all over the world. Our mission, with your help, is to get them all into Acronym Finder.

So, someone might congratulate us on this milestone, but really, the congratulations and kudos go to all those users and contributors for helping us to build the largest human-edited database of acronyms and abbreviations. Thank you everyone! And stay tuned...

Sincerely,

Mike Molloy, CAW
(Chief Acronym Wrangler ;-)

Acronym Finder rolls over 750,000 definitions!

On Saturday, January 31, 2009 at about 7:46pm EST, an editor reviewed and added the 750,000th meaning to the Acronym Finder database!

The abbreviation added was NPQTL, which stands for "National Project on the Quality of Teaching and Learning", an Australian education project to develop and implement national teacher competency standards.

Hitting the three quarters of a million milestone is pretty exciting, especially when we only "rolled over" the 600,000 count less than a year ago.

That means in just under 10 months our editors (paid, not volunteer) carefully reviewed, classified, and added 150,000 definitions!

We appreciate all the millions of wonderful Acronym Finder users around the world who have contributed to this database for the past nearly 11 years. There's no way we could have built such a comprehensive free resource without your help. Thank you, and keep those new abbreviations coming. We look forward to telling you when we reach the 1 million definition milestone!

Sincerely,

Mike Molloy
Chief Acronym Wrangler :-)

Acronym Finder rolls over 600,000 definitions

This morning, we added our 600,000th definition to the database!

In case you're wondering, the definition we added to reach this milestone was "Precision Fluency Shaping Program" or PFSP.

The Precision Fluency Shaping Program is a comprehensive therapy for the treatment of stuttering and was developed by Ronald L. Webster, PhD. It's now administered by Ross S. Barrett, M.A., CCC/SLP. Mr. Barrett is the Director of Fluency Programs and an instructor of Clinical Otolaryngology at the Eastern Virginia Medical School.

Since Acronym Finder went online in 1997 with over 43,000 definitions, the database has grown by over 550,000 human-edited terms! Our conservative estimates are that we have spent over 6,000 hours reviewing and editing the definitions we have so far. And we're still growing by almost 150 new terms every day of the year!

We thank all our loyal users from around the world who suggest new acronyms and abbreviations for what is arguably the largest and most comprehensive resource of its kind.

AcronymFinder.com grows to more than 200,000 unique abbreviations

Acronym Finder, the world’s largest and most respected acronym and abbreviation search engine reaches a new content milestone.

Estes Park, CO (PRWEB) January 8, 2008 – Mountain Data Systems, LLC, the publisher of Acronym Finder, the most comprehensive reference site for abbreviations and acronyms, reports that its database now contains over 200,000 unique abbreviations with over 585,000 abbreviation meanings.

Mike Molloy, founder and developer of the human-edited AcronymFinder.com, said, "This milestone demonstrates a depth of content in the human-edited Acronym Finder not found in any other abbreviation reference resource. Even respected printed dictionaries and dictionary websites have ‘only’ 200,000 to 300,000 unique words. We have over 200,000 unique terms, with nearly 600,000 definitions. And generally speaking, abbreviations are expressing more complex concepts and ideas than a single word.”

Acronym Finder's counting methodology is conservative -- each unique abbreviation’s meaning is counted only once, even if it appears in multiple categories. Molloy adds, “Some of our competitors put a single definition in five different categories, and count that as five definitions.”

Thanks to AcronymFinder.com’s loyal users and contributors, the total number of human-edited abbreviation definitions in Acronym Finder is expected to reach a record 600,000 in early 2008. Molloy says, “traditional word dictionaries grow by a few hundred new words each year, but Acronym Finder grows by about 5,000 verified abbreviation definitions each month.”

Molloy adds, “And in the unlikely event you can’t find the definition for an abbreviation at Acronym Finder, try the Acronym Attic, an unedited sister site. The ‘Attic’ has another 3 million or so candidate acronyms and abbreviations we haven’t reviewed yet.”

About AcronymFinder.com:

The privately held AcronymFinder.com is the largest and most authoritative acronym and abbreviation reference website and has been online for over 10 years. AcronymFinder.com receives more than 1 million unique visitors each month from over 210 countries.

Copyright (c) 2008, Mountain Data Systems

Press Contact
Mike Molloy
AcronymFinder.com
970-586-5556

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Acronym Finder chosen as Refdesk.com SOTD

On May 17, 2007 Acronym Finder was the Site of the Day (SOTD) at Refdesk.com, one of the mostly highly regarded news and reference portal websites.

Bob Drudge has done an outstanding job with organizing and indexing the very best resources on the web. We're honored not only as a SOTD selection, but also as a Refdesk.com recommendation for acronym and abbreviation reference. Thanks, and keep up the good work, Bob!

AcronymFinder.com Celebrates Ten Year Anniversary

Acronym Finder, the world’s largest and most trusted acronym and abbreviation reference source, celebrates its 10^th year online.

Estes Park, Colorado May 1, 2007 – Mountain Data Systems LLC, the publisher of Acronym Finder (www.acronymfinder.com), announced that it is marking its tenth year online as the most respected and widely-used abbreviations reference source.

Mike Molloy, the founder and developer of AcronymFinder.com, said, “When I launched the site in 1997, I had two goals: I wanted to make available a database of abbreviations and acronyms I had collected since 1985; and I wanted to learn about web database programming. Acronym Finder wasn’t the first web-based abbreviations search site, but the day it went online, it became the largest human-edited collection available – and it still is.”

In early 1998, Acronym Finder was picked as a USA Today Hot Site, and was soon a Netscape Cool Site of the Day. Visits to the site soared, and many users began to suggest meanings for new abbreviations not found in the database. So many new meanings streamed in that Molloy had to develop a submission form to accept new entries and a custom software application to speed up verifying and editing all the new terms.

“I knew the abbreviations database might be very useful to others, but I had no idea how quickly it would be embraced and enhanced by web users all over the world,” Molloy says. People contributing to Acronym Finder were pioneers in what we now call “user-generated content.” The site launched with just over 43,000 entries and doubled in size in less than two years.

Molloy added, “Now, just ten years later, Acronym Finder has over 550,000 terms, and is still growing by an average of 200 new entries every day.” The site is queried around the clock by users worldwide, and in every conceivable discipline: K-12 and university students and educators; government and defense industry employees; medical transcriptionists; translators and interpreters, and anyone with a need to decipher the alphabet soup of letters that abbreviate often highly technical concepts.

The site’s rapid growth and popularity garnered further recognition in the press: two more USA Today Hot Site mentions; twice named as a PC Magazine Top 100 Website; Site of the Week in TechTV’s The ScreenSavers; and selected for the Britannica Internet Guide Award. Acronym Finder was also chosen for the Writer’s Digest Best Websites for Writers, and it made the list of Best Free Reference Websites selected by the American Library Association’s Machine-Assisted Reference Section. Most recently, Acronym Finder and its owners were featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal on January 13, 2007.

Acronym Finder also collaborates with, links with, or licenses content to other major web search and reference providers, including TheFreeDictionary.com, Reference.com, RefDesk.com, Ask.com, OneLook.com, and many others.

Molloy concluded, “We look forward to celebrating many more milestones in providing our high quality reference content to users around the world.”

About AcronymFinder.com:

The privately held AcronymFinder.com is the largest and most authoritative acronym and abbreviation reference website. Users from a wide variety of disciplines visit this free resource to look up acronyms from every imaginable subject area. Each month AcronymFinder.com receives over 1 million unique visitors from over 180 countries and answers more than 3 million acronym and abbreviation queries.

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Copyright © 2007, Mountain Data Systems, LLC

Press Contact
Mike Molloy
AcronymFinder.com
970-586-5556

Acronym Finder featured in Wall Street Journal

We were thrilled to see Acronym Finder featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) for Saturday, January 13, 2007.

Read the article here.

Acronym Finder knows postal codes!

Acronym Finder just became a lot smarter. We've added official US Postal Service ZIP codes (over 70,000) and official Canadian postal codes (over 800,000) to our database. To search postal codes, you don't have to do anything special -- just type them into the Acronym Finder search box and you'll get a result for any valid postal code in the United States or Canada.

You can search for any US ZIP code and get back information about the City, State, County, telephone area code, and time zone (including UTC offset), and whether that ZIP code observes daylight saving time (DST). For Canadian postal codes, we tell you the City, Province, area code, time zone and DST info. In addition, the result page shows you a scrollable/zoomable map with options for Satellite or Hybrid views, courtesy of Google Maps.

To see this in action, click on one of these example links: United States 20500 or Canada K1P 1J1

Please let us know if you have any feedback about this new feature, including other things you'd like to see on the postal code result page.

P.S. If we counted our new postal codes as abbreviations the way some of our competitors do, we just added over 870,000 new records to our 520,000+ human-edited database of acronyms and abbreviations. When you add the other 3 million or so definitions in our Acronym Attic, we have almost 4.5 million "definitions" in our database. Anyone can claim to be the largest acronym and abbreviation database in the world. We really are.

Add Acronym Finder search to Internet Explorer 7 (IE7)

One of the many new features of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7.0 is a convenient search box in the upper right of your browser window. This search box allows you to do web searches or other kinds of searches, and can contain a number of different search providers.

You can now install Acronym Finder as one of your search providers. All you have to do is click here to install it! (Note: you must be running IE7 to install this.)

Add Acronym Finder to your Google Personalized Home Page

If you use Google's Personalized Home Page, you may want to add our new content module (shown at right) to your home page.

This content module provides a form to submit a search query to Acronym Finder, and a link to our home page.

To use Google's Personalized Home Page you must be signed in to your Google Account (free). If you don't have a Google Account, click here.

To add the Acronym Finder content module to your Google Personalized Home Page, click here.

Google Toolbar custom button for Acronym Finder

Google has released a beta version of their newest toolbar (only available for Internet Explorer for now). The new toolbar has many new features and supports Custom Buttons.

We've created a Google Toolbar Button for Acronym Finder. Click here to install it. You must have Internet Explorer to use this beta Toolbar. If you don't have the latest Google Toolbar, clicking the install link above will allow you to download and install it and then installation of the Acronym Finder Custom Button will continue.

In our Custom Button, we've also included a drop-down of feeds from the What's New section of this blog. Click the downward-pointing black triangle to the right of the button to see the latest Acronym Finder news.

Using the button. There are several ways to use this custom button to search:

• Type an acronym or abbreviation to search for in the toolbar's search box, then press the Acronym Finder button.
• Highlight/select an acronym on any web page and then press the Acronym Finder button.
• Use the dropdown at the left of the toolbar search box and select the Acronym Finder search, then type an acronym or abbreviation into the box and press Enter

Create other buttons. If you have the latest version of this toolbar installed, you can create a custom button or search button for almost any site, by right-clicking the search box on that site, clicking on "Generate Custom Search..." and then follow the directions. This feature allows you to create a custom Google Toolbar button to integrate the search of almost any site into your own installation of the toolbar. Google has a Toolbar Gallery of other buttons you can install. There's also information available to help you learn to create your own buttons.

New Acronym Finder search features!

Happy New Year everyone! We've just rolled out several new and improved search features for Acronym Finder.

Rank
One change you'll see to an acronym search result is a new column called "Rank". Rank is our measure of the relative "commonness", "popularity" or "relevance" of the meaning of an acronym. You'll see that the results are sorted by decreasing rank, which means the most commonly used meanings will be listed first. You can re-sort the list with an alphabetical sort if you like and you'll still be able to see each meaning's rank.

Rank is available in normal acronym searches, and "word in meaning" (reverse lookup) searches.

Categories
Though we've had a good bit of our database categorized for awhile, we didn't have very effective ways of using these categories to filter the results. The table of search results now has tabs at the top showing the categories and how many definitions we have in each category. The default search shows all definitions. Click on the text in a category to show only the definitions from that category using the default rank order, as above.

The ranking of terms also applies within each Category filter. The category tabs also work in both acronym and word in meaning searches.

Summary
We think these new search features will dramatically improve your ability to quickly find what you're looking for at Acronym Finder. Try a few searches to see how to combine the ranking and filters.

Please let us know if there are improvements we can make to these search features or if you have any ideas about new features to improve the usefulness of Acronym Finder.

Improved results paging

We've improved the way you can page through our search results.

In addition to the Next page and Previous page we had previously, you can now jump to any result page just by clicking on the page number. You can see the links for paging through results at the bottom of the table of acronyms/meanings.

Thanks to a number of users for suggesting this feature!

New Feature: Single definition links

We've added a useful new feature to Acronym Finder's search result page. Next to each acronym or abbreviation's meaning, you'll see a small link image/symbol. If you click on that image, you'll be taken to a new page showing only that single definition in a simple, uncluttered format.

What's this for? If you're writing an article, message, or forum post and want to link to Acronym Finder's definition for an acronym in your text, you can use this page/URL to show only the specific definition (rather than showing all the results). This allows you to unambiguously define a term.

Once you're on this page, you can also search for that definition in Google. And we've provided a one-click feature to make a TinyURL(tm) so you can easily provide the link to someone else. And of course, you can see other Acronym Finder definitions for the acronym on the page or you can do a new search.

Also, you will automatically be sent to the single definition page if we have only one definition for an acronym.

Here's a TinyURL demonstrating what this new feature looks like. Enjoy!