What does "initialism" mean?

A term formed from the initial letters of several words or parts of words, which is itself pronounced letter by letter.

What is a synonym for "initialism"?

Common synonyms include: acronym, acronym, alphabetism, symbol.

Pronounced //ɪˈnɪʃəlɪzəm//.

//ɪˈnɪʃəlɪzəm// noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Noun

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."
2
an abbreviation formed from the initial letters of the several words in the name and pronounced separately wordnet
3
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."
4
a word formed from the initial letters of the several words in the name and pronounced as one word wordnet

"The term BBC is an initialism for the British Broadcasting Corporation."

From initial + -ism.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.