The Association of Somewhat Knowledgeable Mindhive Enquirers

January 10, 2016 10:47 AM

I've run into a lot of clever acronyms for organizations lately, and have wondered which came first, the chicken or the egg. If you ever were tasked to name an organization and/or come up with its acronym, did the name of the organization just happen to lend itself to compacting neatly into a self-descriptive acronym, or did the acronym dictate or alter the name of the organization? What was the path you followed to arrive there?
posted by not_on_display to Grab Bag (6 answers total)

When they're particularly clever, you usually begin with a short list of catchy acronyms and then juggle words to make them make sense until one of them actually works. In other words, the acronym dictates the name.
posted by DarlingBri at 10:52 AM on January 10, 2016

I've done it a couple of times, and we've always sort of "met in the middle" -- you come up with a name, realize that the acronym is kinda close to something cool, then massage the name until it fits.
posted by Etrigan at 10:55 AM on January 10, 2016

The term "backronym" describes one of those processes.
posted by at at 1:06 AM on January 11, 2016

Seconding DarlingBri and Etrigan. At my old workplace, you'd start with a list of words relating to a certain theme (our lab had one overarching theme for everyone's projects, but that's of course not necessary). You'd then take the themed list and a list of words describing what your software did, then try to figure out which ones already shared a few initials, and whether you could shoe-horn some of the acronyms the rest of the way with some creative abuses (e.g., using the first two letters, spelling the word in a cool way, dropping vowels, etc).
posted by en forme de poire at 3:14 AM on January 11, 2016

Thanks for your answers! I guess the title of my post would be considered a "backronym" (And "backronym" in and of itself is another conveniently invented word!)
posted by not_on_display at 10:48 AM on January 11, 2016

Anecdata from a project rather than organization perspective but when you don't use the "backronym" approach, you end up with the State Hospital IT project. True story.
posted by finding.perdita at 11:30 PM on January 11, 2016