initialism

Noun

initialism (plural initialisms)

1. A term formed from the initial letters of several words or parts of words, which is itself pronounced letter by letter.
   • The term BBC is an initialism for the British Broadcasting Corporation.

   Synonyms:

   alphabetism

2. The process of forming words or terms using initial letters of other words.
   • The next most frequent source language was English, with neologistic compounds accounting for 15 etymologies, with 9 other English-based terms from a variety of word formation processes such as initialism and semantic extension.2015, James Lambert, “Lexicography as a teaching tool: A Hong Kong case study”, in Lan Li, Jamie McKeown, Liming Liu, editors, Dictionaries and corpora: Innovations in reference science. Proceedings...