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From: dsn@umcp-cs.UUCP (Dana S. Nau)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: When does an Acronym become a Word?
Message-ID: <176@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 10-Mar-86 18:13:02 EST
Article-I.D.: umcp-cs.176
Posted: Mon Mar 10 18:13:02 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 12-Mar-86 22:33:01 EST
References: <837@bute.tcom.stc.co.uk> <1172@mmintl.UUCP>
Reply-To: dsn@maryland.UUCP (Dana S. Nau)
Organization: U of Maryland, Computer Science Dept., College Park, MD
Lines: 20

In article <1172@mmintl.UUCP> franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams) writes:
> ...
>I will note that the Economist tends to print all acronyms with only the
>first letter capitalized.  I'm not sure if this is common in England, or
>a peculiarity of that publication.

A few years ago I had a paper published in IEEE *Computer*.  Unlike most
technical journals, they make lots of editorial changes in the papers they
print.  They had the following policy about acronyms:

If a formal name was *really* an acronym (i.e., the initial letters of the
words in some phrase), they would capitalize every letter (e.g., "KRL" for
"Knowledge Representation Language").  Otherwise, they would only capitalize
the first letter (e.g., "Lisp" for "LISt Processing").  As a result, they
often insisted on capitalizing the names of computer systems differently
from the way it had been done by the authors of those systems.
-- 

Dana S. Nau,  Comp. Sci. Dept.,  U. of Maryland,  College Park,  MD 20742
dsn@maryland		seismo!umcp-cs!dsn		(301) 454-7932