All About Acronyms Trivia Quiz

Answer: Bell Laboratories

Although acronyms existed prior to 1943, there was no term to describe them until staff at Bell Laboratories coined the term to describe a word that is derived by taking the first letter of each word in a phrase to create an abbreviation that becomes a new word.

The term acronym is formed from the combining form acro- (Greek: "akros" meaning tip or end) and the suffix -nym (Greek: "onyma" meaning name). That is, an acronym is formed by taking the "tip" or first letter(s) of each word.

Answer: golf

According to Wikipedia, the term backronym was first used in a 1983 Washington Post article where it was defined as the 'same as an acronym, except that the words were chosen to fit the letters'. In fact, a backronym was created for the term acronym - A Capitalised Representation Of Names You Memorize!

Some say that the word golf was coined because it stood for "gentlemen only, ladies forbidden" but most sources say that it is actually derived from the old Scottish name for the game, gouf or gowf. Backronyms are often created for amusement; for example, to explain the origins of certain socially unacceptable words. There is no truth in the urban myth that a certain four-letter word stands for "fornication under consent of the king" or "for unlawful carnal knowledge".

Answer: the health of a newborn

Strictly speaking, Apgar is an eponym, not an acronym. An eponym is a word formed from, or including, one or more names. The Apgar score was named after Dr Virginia Apgar who invented it in 1952. The Apgar score is determined by evaluating the baby on five criteria - skin colour, pulse rate, irritability or response to stimulation, muscle tone and breathing.

In order to remember these criteria, an acronym was eventually created to fit them - Appearance, Pulse, Grimace, Activity, Respiration. Another acronym that was created to fit is American Pediatric Gross Assessment Record. So Apgar is an eponym, an acronym (or if you wish, a backronym) and a mnemonic (memory aid), all rolled into one!

Answer: United States Navy personnel

The invention of the scuba diving gear that we commonly use today is largely attributable to Jacques Cousteau and Emile Gagnan in 1942 by virtue of their invention of the 'demand regulator'. In 1943, they began selling it under the name "Aqua-Lung". But they did not coin the acronym 'scuba'.

The term actually predates their invention. Its usage been traced back to 1939; it was coined by United States Navy personnel to refer to their divers' rebreather sets.

Answer: All of these answers are acronyms

JAL stands for Japan Airlines Corporation, the national airline of Japan, and Lacsa (Spanish: Lineas Aereas Costarricenses, Sociedad Anonima) is the national airline of Costa Rica.

Qantas refers to Qantas Airways Limited, the national airline of Australia. The name was originally QANTAS, an acronym for "Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services".

My airline friends have many humorous acronyms for Qantas. Here are a few of them:
Queasy and Nauseous, Tired And Sick
Quick And Nasty Transportation, Australian Style
Quite A Neat Trick, Arriving Safely
Quite A Nice Trip, All Survived
There are quite a few more but they are not suitable to be printed here!

Answer: ENIAC

ENIAC stands for Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer. It was designed and built in the 1940s at the University of Pennsylvania in response to military needs during the Second World War. UNIVAC (the UNIVersal Automatic Computer) was the first commercial computer.

It was designed by the same team who invented ENIAC but it was not produced until 1951. It was first used by the United States Census Bureau. COBOL and BASIC are programming languages, standing for COmmon Business-Oriented Language, and Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, respectively.

Answer: Benelux

OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) is a cartel of 12 non-European countries. NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) is a military alliance currently comprising 28 members including the United States. ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations, pronounced Asian) is a political and economic organization of 10 Southeast Asian countries. Benelux is an economic union of three neighbouring European countries - Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg - the name being derived from the first two or three letters of each member's name.

It was established in 1958 to promote trade within that region.

Answer: Holmes (after Sherlock Holmes, the great detective)

In Britain, HOLMES (Home Office Large Major Enquiry System) was the name given to the first information technology system which was to investigate serious crimes. It was established in 1986 and the database is used by the various police forces in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

It was, of course, named after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's great fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, and is yet another example of a "backronym".

Answer: MASH

M*A*S*H is both a medical drama and a comedy (sometimes a black comedy). Ostensibly it is about the Korean War but, according to some sources, it is also an allegory about the Vietnam War (which was still going on when the show first aired in 1972). It is based on a novel, "MASH" by Richard Hooker (published in 1968) and a movie of the same name (1970). M*A*S*H stands for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital.

The asterisks in the acronym serve no purpose - they first appeared in the movie posters, but they never appeared on screen in the movie and they never appeared in the original novel (although they did in the two sequels that Hooker wrote).

Answer: False

This is false, although it may be true some of the time. An acronym tends to start life written in uppercase but eventually it may be reduced to lower case as the word formed becomes commonly used and people cease to think about it in terms of its individual components. We usually don't think about lasers in terms of light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.

However, if there is likely to be confusion between an acronym and the word it forms, the acronym will retain its capitalised form. An example of this is AIDS (as in acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) and the word aids (as in medical aids to assist patients).