Recursive acronym

Arecursive acronymis anacronymthatrefers to itself,and appears most frequently in computer programming. The term was first used in print in 1979 inDouglas Hofstadter's bookGödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid,in which Hofstadter invents the acronym GOD, meaning "GOD Over Djinn", to help explain infinite series, and describes it as a recursive acronym.Other references followed,however the concept was used as early as 1968 inJohn Brunner's science fiction novelStand on Zanzibar.In the story, the acronym EPT (Education for a Particular Task) later morphed into "Eptification for Particular Task".

Recursive acronyms typically formbackwardly:either an existing ordinary acronym is given a new explanation of what the letters stand for, or a name is turned into an acronym by giving the letters an explanation of what they stand for, in each case with the first letter standing recursively for the whole acronym.

Use in computing

Incomputing,an early tradition in thehackercommunity, especially atMIT,was to choose acronyms and abbreviations that referred humorously to themselves or to other abbreviations. Perhaps the earliest example in this context is thebackronym"Mash Until No Good", which was created in 1960 to describeMung,and revised to "Mung Until No Good". It lived on as a recursive command in the editing languageTECO.^[3]In 1977programmer Ted Anderson coined TINT ( "TINT Is NotTECO"), an editor for MagicSix. This inspired the two MITLisp Machineeditors calledEINE( "EINE Is NotEmacs",German forone) andZWEI( "ZWEI Was EINE Initially", German fortwo), in turn inspiring Anderson's retort SINE ( "SINE is not EINE" ).Richard Stallmanfollowed withGNU(GNU's NotUnix).

Recursive acronym examples often include negatives, such as denials that the thing defined is or resembles something else (which the thing defined does in fact resemble or is even derived from), to indicate that, despite the similarities, it was distinct from the program on which it was based.

An earlier example appears in a 1976 textbook on data structures, in which the pseudo-language SPARKS is used to define the algorithms discussed in the text. "SPARKS" is claimed to be a non-acronymic name, but "several cute ideas have been suggested" as expansions of the name. One of the suggestions is thetail recursive"Smart Programmers Are Required to Know SPARKS".

Other examples are theYAMLlanguage, which stands for "YAML ain't markup language" andPHPlanguage meaning "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor".

Examples

• Allegro:Allegro Low LEvel Game ROutines (early versions for Atari ST were called "Atari Low Level Game Routines" )
• AROS:AROS Research Operating System (originally Amiga Research Operating System)
• ATI:ATI Technologies Inc.
• BIRD:BIRD Internet Routing Daemon
• CAVE:CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment
• cURL:Curl URL Request Library
• Darcs:Darcs Advanced Revision Control System
• EINE:EINE Is Not Emacs
• FIJI:FIJI Is JustImageJ
• GiNaC:GiNaC is Not a CAS (Computer Algebra System)
• GNU:GNU's Not Unix
• GNE (encyclopedia):GNE's Not Encyclopedia
• GPE:GPE Palmtop Environment
• gRPC:grpc Remote Procedure Calls
• JACK:JACK Audio Connection Kit
• KGS:KGS Go Server
• LAME:LAME Ain'tMP3Encoder
• LiVES:LiVES is Video Editing System
• MINT:MINT Is NotTRAC
• MINDY:MINDY Is NotDylanYet
• MiNT:MiNT is Not TOS (later changed to "MiNT is Now TOS" )
• Mung:Mung Until No Good
• Nagios:Nagios Ain't Gonna Insist On Sainthood (a reference to the previous name of Nagios, "Netsaint";agios[αγιος] is the Greek word for "saint" )
• NiL:NiL Isn't Liero
• Ninja-ide:Ninja-IDE Is Not Just Another IDE
• PHP:PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (from "Personal Home Page Tools", more frequently referenced as "PHP Tools.")
• PINE:PINE Is NearlyElm,originally; PINE now officially stands for "Pine Internet News E-mail"
• PIP:PIP Installs Packages
• P.I.P.S.:P.I.P.S. Is POSIX Symbian
• PNG:officially "Portable Network Graphics", but unofficially "PNG's not GIF".
• RPM:RPM Package Manager
• SPARQL:SPARQL Protocol And RDF Query Language
• TikZ:TikZ ist kein Zeichenprogramm (German; TikZ is not a drawing program)
• TiLP:TiLP is Linking Program
• TIP:TIP isn'tPico
• TRESOR:TRESOR Runs Encryption Securely Outside RAM
• UIRA:UIRA Isn't Recursive Acronym
• WINE:WINE Is Not Emulator
• XAMPP:XAMPP Apache MariaDB PHP Perl
• XBMC:XBMC Media Center (originally Xbox Media Center)
• XINU:XINU Is Not Unix
• XNA:XNA's Not Acronym'd
• YAML:YAML Ain't Markup Language (initially "Yet Another Markup Language" )
• YARA:Yara: Another Recursive Acronym
• Zinf:Zinf Is Not FreeAmp
• ZWEI:ZWEI Was EINE Initially ( "eins" and "zwei" are German for "one" and "two" respectively)

Other examples

Companies and organizations

• BWIA:BWIA West Indies Airways(formerly British West Indian Airways)
• CYGNUS Solutions:"Cygnus, Your GNU Solutions"
• HIJOS:Hijas e Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio(literally, "Daughters and Sons for Identity and Justice against Forgetfulness and Silence" )
• HIM:HIM International Music, Taiwanese independent record label
• MEGA:MEGA Encrypted Global Access
• MOM: MOM's Organic Market
• SAAB:Saab Automobile AB
• TAP: TAP Air Portugal
• VISA:Visa International Service Association
• ZINC:ZINC Is Not Commercial
• OIL:Oil India Limited.However it can be debatable as "Oil" is a noun and the company is in the oil industry.

In media

• The initials for theCommodore CDTVstand for Commodore Commodore Dynamic Total Vision.
• TTP: a technology project in theDilbertcomic strip. The initials stand for "The TTP Project".
• GRUNGE:defined byHomer SimpsoninThe SimpsonsepisodeThat '90s Showas "Guitar Rock Utilizing Nihilist Grunge Energy", another uncommon example of a recursive acronym whose recursive letter is neither the first nor the last letter.
• BOB:the primary antagonist from the seriesTwin Peaks.His name itself is an acronym standing for "Beware of BOB".
• KOS-MOS:a character from theXenosagaseries of video games. "KOS-MOS" is a recursive acronym meaning "Kosmos Obey Strategical Multiple Operation System".
• Hiroshi Yoshimura's "A・I・R" stands for "AIR IN RESORT".

Brands and products

• MIATA:MIATA is Always the Answer
• TheGNU Hurdproject is named with a mutually recursive acronym: "Hurd" stands for "Hird Unix-ReplacingDaemons",and" Hird "stands for" Hurd Interfaces Representing Depth. "
• Jiniclaims the distinction of being the first recursive anti-acronym: 'Jini Is Not Initials'.It might, however, be more properly termed an anti-backronym because the term "Jini" never stood for anything in the first place. The more recent "XNA",on the other hand, was deliberately designed that way.

Special

• RPM, PHP, XBMC and YAML were originally conventional acronyms which were later redefined recursively. They are examples of, or may be referred to as, backronymization,where the official meaning of an acronym is changed.
• Most recursive acronyms are recursive on the first letter, which is therefore an arbitrary choice, often selected for reasons of humour, ease of pronunciation, or consistency with an earlier acronym that used the same letters for different words, such as PHP, which now stands for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor", but was originally "Personal Home Page". HoweverYOPY,"Your own personal YOPY" is recursive on the last letter.
• A joke implying that the middle initial "B." in the name ofBenoit B. Mandelbrotstands for "Benoit B. Mandelbrot" plays on the idea thatfractals,which Mandelbrot studied, repeat themselves at smaller and smaller scales when examined closely.

Other

• According toHayyim Vital,a 16th–17th centurykabbalist,theHebrewwordadam(אדם, meaning "man" ) is an acronym foradam, dibbur, maaseh(man, speech, deed).
• According toIsaac Luria,a 16th-century kabbalist, the Hebrew wordtzitzit(ציצת in its Biblical spelling, meaning "ritual fringes" ) is an acronym fortzaddik yafrid tzitziyotav tamid( "a righteous person should separate [the strings of] histzitzitconstantly ").

See also

• Bilingual tautological expressions– Redundancy in linguistic expression
• RAS syndrome– Acronym redundantly coupled with its word(s) (Redundant Acronym Syndrome syndrome)
• Self-reference– Sentence, idea or formula that refers to itself
• TLA, thethree-letter acronymfor three-letter acronyms
• Web Ontology Language– Family of knowledge representation languages, which intentionally uses the acronym "OWL"

References

• This article is based in part on theJargon File,which is in the public domain.

External links

• The dictionary definition ofrecursive acronymat Wiktionary