alphabet soup

Noun

alphabet soup (countable and uncountable, plural alphabet soups)

1. A type of soup that contains noodles in the shape of various alphabetical letters, sometimes also numbers.
   • Meronym: alfabeto
   • Parents have been entertaining their children at mealtime with alphabet soup since the nineteenth century.
2. (figuratively) A cryptic overabundance of acronyms and abbreviations.
   • The various engineering teams' correspondence on circuit board design was an alphabet soup to outsiders.
   • And particularly in headlines and written materials, gay was used over LGBT. One ambivalent heterosexual ally explained this decision-making: I think there were several people who were sensitive to issues like that about do we use the word lesbian? Do we use the word transgender? And it's not that...2006, Amy L. Stone, More than adding a T: transgender inclusion in Michigan gay rights ordinances, 1992-2000
3. (figuratively, metonymically) A quantity of people or organizations that are referred to by acronyms.
   • too many three-letter agencies, constituting an alphabet soup
4. (figuratively, particle) A physical state in which there is a miscellany of different particles, often designated by letters.
   • This part of the neutron star has been described as ‘a rich Greek alphabet soup’.1978, Patrick Moore, 1978 Yearbook of Astronomy, page 172
   • The early big bang is an alphabet soup of quarks, W bosons, gluons, and other exotic particles and flavors. In the usual scenario, there is no place for the pion. It dissociates in the alphabet soup of the early universe.1997, Nee-Pong Chang, “Chirality in the Early Universe”, in Ling Fong Li et al., editors, Looking to the 21st Century: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Frontiers of Physics...
5. (slang) The series of preliminary races (denoted by letters) through which drivers must advance to the main event.