Posting Abbreviations and Acronyms

When including abbreviations and acronyms in your weblog posts, it is wise for you to use the proper markup for them.

Here’s an example sentence:

Core OS Story Highlights: NASA announced today...

“OS” is the abbreviation for Operating System, and “NASA” is the acronym for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Instead of typing that example sentence in your blog exactly the way it appears above, you should insert them within <abbr> and <acronym> HTML tags. See the steps below for this site (and other WordPress powered blogs).

When preparing your post, switch your view to “Code” and edit the sentence by inserting the appropriate tags like this:

Core <abbr title="Operating System">OS</abbr> Story Highlights: <acronym title="National Aeronautics and Space Administration">NASA</acronym> announced today...

So what is the difference? What is an abbreviation and what is an acronym? There are 2 or 3 opinions, but I will stick to the one that is most simply the easiest to remember: if you pronounce it like a whole word e.g. NATO is pronounced “nay-toe”, then it’s an acronym, everything else is an abbreviation. Easy!

And yes, I know about initialism too, but there is no tag for it, is there? So I won’t discuss it, not today at least.