Abbreviation or acronym?

Frankly, I never gave this much thought before. What is the difference between an abbreviation and an acronym? Before this, I thought the two are interchangeable, or in other words, abbreviation and acronym are two words referring to the same thing, or technically speaking, "synonyms."

But I just found out that this is not so.

An abbreviation is the short form of a word. To cite a couple of examples, "Doctor" is abbreviated to "Dr" and Professor is abbreviated to "Prof." Apparently there's a rule (although it's not really enforceable), on the usage of abbreviation. Take the word "Doctor" for instance. It is abbreviated to "Dr" without a full stop at the end of the abbreviation. This is because the abbreviation ends with the last letter of the word. Contrast this to the word "Professor" which is abbreviated to "Prof." where in this case, the full stop must be present because the abbreviation does not end with the actual last letter of the word.

So that explains it. I have often wondered why certain abbreviations have punctuation marks while others don't. Now I know when to use the full stop and when not to use it in my writings (both academic and creative).

An acronym meanwhile refers to a word that combines the initial letters of each word. There are many examples of this that can be found in many different areas. In cybertalk, oft-used acronyms are like rotfl (rolling on the floor laughing), brb (be right back), afk (away from keyboard), lol (laugh out loud) and many more. In science, we have acronyms like stp (standard temperature and pressure), IUPAC (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry) and others. I am sure we can think of many other examples of acronyms.

There you have it: The differences between abbreviation and acronym (not that anyone asked me to write on this).

For further reading, I suggest you click on this link.