About the Acronym Finder

• What is an acronym?
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The Acronym Finder is a searchable database of more than abbreviations and acronyms about computers, technology, telecommunications, and the military. Over the years, the site has received numerous awards.

Acronym Finder is not a glossary of terms, web search engine, or dictionary or a thesaurus -- it is only designed to search for and expand acronyms and abbreviations. If you need more information about a word or other reference topic, we highly recommend TheFreeDictionary.com.

See Search Tips for information about using the site, including advanced search techniques.

If you don't find an acronym or abbreviation in the database, but know its meaning, you may suggest it be added here. If it meets our guidelines, it will be reviewed, verified, edited, and added to our database in our next update (usually several times a week).

Acronym Finder currently has over 1,000,000 human-edited definitions for acronyms and abbreviations. The site receives over 1 million unique visitors from more than 200 countries each month and serves over 4 million page views. According to Alexa's traffic ranking, Acronym Finder is in the top quarter percent of all websites.

Acronym Finder has partnered with other respected reference and language companies, including TheFreeDictionary.com, OneLook.com, and Dictionary.com.

Acronym Finder is a trusted ready reference resource at thousands of schools, libraries, and government websites. Yahoo reports over 1 million links to Acronym Finder, more than all other similar websites combined. By any measure, it is an "authority" website, trusted by schools, libraries, universities, governments, the defense industry, and translators and interpreters worldwide.

Acronym Finder adds more than 5,000 new acronym and abbreviation definitions to its database each month. Every term is reviewed for accuracy, verified from multiple sources, categorized, and edited by an experienced human editor.

What's an Acronym?

An acronym is a pronounceable word formed from each of the first letters of a descriptive phrase or by combining the initial letters or parts of words from the phrase. Here are some examples of acronyms:

North Atlantic Treaty Organization = NATO
MODulator/DEModulator = MODEM

An acronym is actually a type of abbreviation. Our database contains abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms and we make no distinction between them in our database or on our site. We are more interested in defining "acronyms" for you than we are in trying to properly distinguish between abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms.

Though you sometimes see acronyms or abbreviations written with periods after each letter (e.g., U.S.A.), we don't use that form here. When entering search terms, don't include the periods (unless the acronym normally contains a period, i.e., X.25).

Want to see a nested acronym? SRK contains three levels of "nested" acronyms (this is not made-up).

Want to have some fun with "buzzword acronyms?" Generate acronyms from our implementation of Philip Broughton's Systematic Buzz Phrase Projector.