Unfortunate Acronyms in the News

We're always amazed (and often amused) at how often an unfortunate acronym is developed to refer to a concept or organization.

Last month, the US organization National Association of Local Government Auditors (NALGA), based in Lexington, Kentucky, decided to change its name to Association of Local Government Auditors (ALGA). Why the change? Well, "nalga" in Spanish means "butt" or "rump" which made the organization the butt (pun intended) of too many jokes and pranks. If this wasn't bad enough, the organization only owned the .org version of the NALGA domain name. Someone else owns the .com version of the site, and it has nothing to do with government auditors! You can read more at ALGA's new website, http://www.governmentauditors.org/

In another recent acronym incident, the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV) is trying to revoke the vanity plate owned by 74 year old Pat Niple. For the last 10 years, her plate read "NWTF" which referred to her business, Northwood Tree Farm. The Ohio BMV is apparently saying she can't use NWTF because it could be Internet/chat slang for "Now What the F***"! Never mind that NWTF also refers to "National Wild Turkey Federation" and has over a dozen other perfectly legitimate meanings. There is an BMV appeal process, so it will be interesting to see if she wins.

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AcronymFinder.com now has over 500,000 acronyms and abbreviations

Mountain Data Systems, LLC, publisher of Acronym Finder, the world’s most respected acronym and abbreviation reference resource, announced that its dictionary has grown to more than half a million human-edited definitions.

Estes Park, Colorado July 24, 2006 – The editors at Acronym Finder (www.acronymfinder.com), just added their 500,000th human-edited definition to the database.

Mike Molloy, founder and developer of AcronymFinder.com, said, “We are thrilled to reach this milestone in our site’s content. Since we’ve been on the web, our database has grown by over 1000%, making it the fastest growing dictionary of its kind. We verify, edit and add about 250 new terms every day, and our visitors suggest most of these new definitions. There’s no way we could create and maintain such a large dictionary without the help of people from all over the world working in every imaginable discipline.”

The half-million definitions in Acronym Finder are searchable by acronym or abbreviation, or by words contained in a meaning. Users can also sort and filter results on several major categories. The site offers free tools to improve convenience and usability for novice and power users alike. Users can also read the Acronym Finder blog for the latest news on the site and its features, and can interact with other site users in a forum.

Molloy believes Acronym Finder’s continued growth and success is not only about how many definitions there are -- it’s also about a quality user experience. “We listen carefully to suggestions and feedback from our users and we continue to work hard to be the world’s largest and best resource for acronyms and abbreviations.”

About AcronymFinder.com:

Launched with about 43,000 definitions, the privately held AcronymFinder.com quickly became 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 © 2006, Mountain Data Systems, LLC

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Mike Molloy
AcronymFinder.com
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April is National Poetry Month (NPM)

Each year in April, the Academy of American Poets (AAP) sponsors National Poetry Month (NPM), our featured abbreviation.

The AAP's FAQ about NPM explains:

"What is National Poetry Month? National Poetry Month was established by the Academy of American Poets as a month-long, national celebration of poetry. The concept was to increase the attention paid-by individuals and the media—to the art of poetry, to living poets, to our poetic heritage, and to poetry books and magazines. In the end, we hoped to achieve an increase in the visibility, presence, and accessibility of poetry in our culture. National Poetry Month has been successful beyond all anticipation and has grown over the years into the largest literary celebration in the world."

As I surfed the AAP's website, I was surprised that even a poetry organization has so many of its own acronyms: AAP, NPM, APLP, POTD

Technorati tags: abbreviations, acronyms, poetry, poems, Academy of American Poets, National Poetry Month

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.

What's your Preference?

You can now set several Acronym Finder search defaults using our new preferences page.

If you have cookies enabled in your browser, you can use the preferences page to set several search defaults:

• Default sort order (rank or alphabetical). If you prefer to show Acronym Finder search result sorted alphabetically instead of by rank/popularity, use this preference.
• Number of results per page. Use this preference to set the number of search results per page. The default is 20, but you can set it to as few as 5 results per page, or as many as 25 per page.
• Default category tab. This setting allows you to choose a different default category (filter) for your searches. For example, if you almost always search only acronyms from Science and Medicine, you can use this preference to make that your default category tab/filter. If you set another category tab as the default, you can still switch to the show all tab.
• In only one result, use direct link page. Use this setting if you prefer to see a more streamlined result page when there is only one result for your search.

Since setting your preferences requires cookies, this means that if you want to use preferences, you'll need to do so for each computer or each browser you use.

Be sure to let us know if experience any problems with preferences or there are other preferences you would like to see.