HACKER Q&A
📣 stephen82

A kind request please about the use of acronyms?


Fellow Hacker News' readers,

I need to confess something: as a non-English speaker, most of the time I'm embarrassed to ask what that 'X' or 'Y' acronym means.

To give an example, NLP.

Is it * Neuro-Linguistic Programming? * Natural Language Processing? * Network Layer Protocol? * Natural Language Paradigm?

...and so on.

9 out of 10 times, I have to patiently look for the comments and pray to find an answer somewhere in thread(s) to save myself from embarrassingly asking.

Now I have decided to take the risk to do so, as I have accumulated countless of acronyms, thanks to Web Development, and not only lol!

Are we getting lazier than ever to type a whole word, let alone a normal sentence, or is it my idea?

Can you English-speaking people help us understand your language better?

Thank you very much and please accept my apologies in advance if I have offended anyone.


  👤 cyberbanjo Accepted Answer ✓
Even as a monolingual native English speaker I absolutely prefer that acronyms and initialisms are defined before use, at least once.

👤 t0mmyb0y
If an acronym isn't defined previous to use, or at first use, I consider it a typo.

👤 rathel
I second that! Considering how crap Google results are these days, even usual methods to decode acronyms often turn futile