Acronym

An Acronym is a word whose letters are the first letters of other words.

People often create a short word that means the same thing as a much longer phrase (set of words), to make it faster and shorter to say the long phrase.

Have a look at the Acronyms which are most used in the Commission

How to write

 * Capitals or lowercase? Dots/fullstops or single "word"?
 * acronyms up to 5 characters are capitalized

To facilitate the printing of multilingual texts, the Publications Office has adopted the following rules for most of the EU languages.
 * (i) Where an acronym, contraction or abbreviation, including names of programmes, of six letters or more can be pronounced, it is printed in upper and lower case (e.g. Unesco, Esprit).
 * (ii) An acronym, contraction or abbreviation, including names of programmes, of up to five letters is printed in capitals (e.g. EEC, COST, AIDS).


 * Examples
 * JUST but DG Justice
 * ESTAT but Eurostat,
 * CNECT but Connect
 * ENERG but DG Energy
 * CELEX but Eurlex
 * ! CORDIS - exception due to a court case with Jonhson&Johnson for Cordis (J&J medicine) - http://publications.europa.eu/code/en/en-4100700en.htm

Why not capitalising
Too long portion of texts capitalised decrease its legibility and increase the time to read/concentrate

Related articles

 * Glossary
 * Style guide
 * IATE

EC resources

 * Publications Office, Interinstitutional style guide, Main acronyms and abbreviations
 * EGNOS Portal, acronyms used by satellite navigation specialists
 * TAXUD, Taxation and Customs Union acronyms


 * http://www.cc.cec/wikis/display/~leiblsa/Typography+FAQ

External resources

 * AcronymFinder.com
 * All-acronyms.com
 * (fr) Sigles.net, in French but covers 40 languages and more than 200 countries