TLA

The three-letter abbreviation or three-letter acronym (TLA) is the most popular type of abbreviation in computing terminology, and is also common in political jargon. Some of these, "DOS" for example, are acronyms.

There are 26³ = 17576 possible abbreviations, and probably most of them are already used. For an illustration, follow the link below to a page of all TLAs from AAA to DZZ. If we allowed numbers, special characters, or case-sensitivity, many more TLAs could be created.

Many TLAs have more than one meaning. There are even TLAs with more than 10 meanings (for example, SDI has at least 32 meanings in the English language). Many abbreviations have more than one expansion with the same meaning. For example GCC was first 'GNU C Compiler', and later 'GNU Compiler Collection'.

In the DOS operating system, because only three-letter file extensions (usually denoting the file type) were allowed, many longer abbreviations were shortened to three letters (for example JPEG to JPG, HTML to HTM).

Many abbreviations come from the shortened names of Usenet groups. For example pra for pl.rec.anime.

Common categories of TLAs:

corporations: IBM, DEC
countries: USA, GDR
file types: PNG, GIF
hardware: CPU, FPU, RAM, ROM
licences: GPL, MPL
operating systems: GNU, BSD, DOS
other standards: UTC
programming languages: PHP, SQL
protocols: FTP, IRC
software: GCC, Gtk
time zones: GMT, UTC, DST
sports: NFL, NBA, MLB
politics: GOP
government: DOD, DOE, HUD, IRS
military: BFR, IRA

A significant amount of TLAs comes from various codes:

IATA airport codes: SFO, MSQ, NGO
ISO 4217 currency codes: RUR, USD
SIL codes for languages: ENG, FRN, SWD, BQT

TLAs became common in the United States during the New Deal of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, including NRA for National Recovery Administration, and TVA for the Tennessee Valley Authority. Detractors of President Roosevelt's policies called the new agencies "alphabet soup."

A four-letter abbreviation (e.g., VERA) is sometimes known as an ETLA (extended TLA).

TLA

See also