When textspeak or chat lingo started gaining prominence, there must have been people, mostly our not so tech-savvy parents or grandparents, who were confused by the acronyms and abbreviations that suddenly popped up in their online conversations with family. Nowadays, acronyms like LOL, LMAO, and ROFL, are more commonplace, and people generally know what they mean, but there are still a lot of Google searches being made about other acronyms and initialisms.
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Letter Solver did a study on which acronyms were the most searched by people. They categorized these acronyms and initialisms into five different areas: gaming, tech, business, dating, and US states. Yes, knowing what your state’s abbreviation can be confusing. Just ask people what the abbreviations for Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, Maine, and Michigan are, and, unless you have specifically searched about them before (as I have), it can get really puzzling.
One thing to note about the study is that there are certain initialisms which might have two or more different meanings, so the number of searches for some initialisms may have been conflated. By the way, the difference between an acronym and an initialism is that an acronym is pronounced like a word (like SCUBA) and initialisms have the individual letters spelled out when you say them (like CEO). Mental Floss took 25 of the most confusing abbreviations but if you want to check the full list of abbreviations, check out Letter Solver’s study.
(Image credit: Grammarly)
Source: neatorama