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What are the differences between an acronym and an acronym?
Acronyms and acronyms are lexical constructions of the group of acronyms that serve to abbreviate a complex expression. The difference between the two is that while an acronym can be formed by taking both the initial and the first part of the words that make up the full name, the acronym is always formed with the initial letter. Below I explain in detail the characteristics of each of these compositions so that you can easily distinguish them.
What is an acronym
In the field of linguistics, an acronym is defined as an acronym that has the peculiarity of being able to be pronounced syllable by syllable as if it were any other word in our language. This differentiates it from the rest of the acronyms, where the reading is done using the name of the letters that form it.
An acronym can be formed by the initials or the first syllable of the terms that make up a phrase. As the aim is for the pronunciation to be fluid, in some cases it becomes necessary to include more than the first letter in the contraction in order to offer a vowel and consonant concatenation that adequately responds to the phonetic norms of our language.
Examples of acronyms
Acronyms are usually made up of more than four letters and always refer to proper nouns.
Some examples of acronyms formed only with the initials can be AMPA (Association of Mothers and Fathers of Students), AVE (Spanish High Speed) and BOJA (Official Bulletin of the Andalusian Government).
Other acronyms such as BANESTO (Spanish Credit Bank), ICONA (National Institute for the Conservation of Nature) or INSALUD (National Institute of Health) are formed using the first part of the words that make up the full denomination to facilitate its pronunciation.
What is an acronym
To refer to complex expressions in our language we have acronyms, a type of lexical composition that consists of the representation of a complex phrase through unitary linguistic signs.
It starts from a complex expression from which its initials are taken and amalgamated, becoming a standard way to refer to it.
Each of the parts of these compositions also receives the acronym name. Thus ACB is the acronym that corresponds to the name Association of Basketball Clubs and at the same time the letters that make it up A, C and B are each an acronym.
Acronym examples
The acronyms are usually formed with two or three letters and in their composition the letters corresponding to prepositions or links are annulled.
WHO is the contraction used to refer to the World Health Organization; LGBT denominates the Movement of struggle for equality for lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgenders; BM corresponds to World Bank and ATS, to Sanitary Technical Assistant.
It is worth mentioning that some of the acronyms that we use in Spanish come from terms taken from other languages, so the order of their letters (remember that we could also call them acronyms) does not correspond to that of the translation. For example PDA is the contraction of Personal Digital Assistant which in Spanish would be Personal Digital Assistant; VHS is Home Video System but the order corresponds to the Anglo-Saxon concept Video Home System and HTML Hypertext Markup Language that corresponds to the words Hypertext Transfer Protocol.
