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Three-letter abbreviations (often inaccurately referred to as three-letter acronyms) (TLAs) are commonly used in industry and other fields. The first known usage of the term TLA was by Texas Instruments Inc. employees in the Industrial Systems Division around 1984. Engineers used to mock the marketing department's tendency to define new products with three-word descriptions, such as CVU for a product line called Control Vision Unit and ACM for Automation Configuration Module. Due to the seemingly excessive use of three-letter acronyms at the company, the employees started to simply report that they were working on "TLA." Note the interesting property that this word describes itself, or self-referencing. Usage of TLA spread through both the industry and academia, and now has become a generally understood acronym. For a complete discussion of the various forms of abbreviations, acronyms and other letter substitutions, see acronyms.

Contents 1 Trivia 2 See also 3 References 4 External links

• Very few of the abbreviations described as "three-letter acronyms" are in fact acronyms - to be an acronym, an abbreviation must be pronounced as a word rather than as three letters. CVU, ACM, TLA, FBI, CIA, etc. are all abbreviations, but none of them are acronyms. An example of an acronym would be NATO.

• According to the Jargon File, a journalist once asked hacker Paul Boutin what he thought the biggest problem in computing in the 1990s would be. Paul's straight-faced response was, "There are only 17,000 three-letter acronyms."

• The number of possible three-letter acronyms using the 26 letters of the alphabet from A to Z ( AAA, AAB ... to ZZY, ZZZ) is 26 × 26 × 26 = 17,576. An exhaustive listing of TLAs can be found here.

• The Jargon File also mentions the term "ETLA", for "Extended Three-Letter Acronym", to refer to four-letter acronyms.

• In English, WWW is the longest possible TLA to pronounce, requiring nine syllables. The author Douglas Adams remarked "The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it's short for." ^[1]

• In 1998 the British band Love and Rockets released their last album, Lift, featuring the song "R.I.P. 20 C." that, apart from the refrain, consists of three-letter acronyms only. A contest was held rewarding the first to correctly give the meanings of all 69 of them.

• In 1999 German hip-hop group Die Fantastischen Vier released the song "MFG" (German for "Mit freundlichen Grüßen" (best regards)), also mainly consisting of TLAs. [1]

• Category:Lists of TLAs
• RAS syndrome
• List of acronyms and initialisms
• List of all two-letter combinations
• List of computing and IT abbreviations
• List of three-letter broadcast callsigns in the United States
• To be done: put reference to TLA generated from three variables where each variable is [A B C D E ... X Y Z 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9].

1. ^ Douglas Adams, The Independent on Sunday, 1999

• Abbreviations.com - A directory and search engine for acronyms and abbreviations.
• Acronymfinder.com - Resource to find multiple meanings of acronyms, sorted by type.
• TLA Wörterbuch - Casia TLA collection
• GTF - the GPL'ed TLA FAQ
• The Great Abbreviations Hunt - A TLA for every combination of letters