An acronym is a short form made from the first letters of the words in a phrase: PNG for Portable Network Graphics, FYI for For Your Information, SCUBA for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. They save space in titles, slides, project names and forms, and a well-chosen one becomes the name people actually use.
Type a phrase on each line and its acronym appears on the matching line, so a list of terms converts in one go.
What it does
The tool splits each line into words and takes the first letter of each. A hyphen, a dash or a slash also counts as a break, so “Self-contained” gives two letters, S and C, which is how SCUBA arrives at five letters. Punctuation at the start of a word is skipped, so a bracketed word still counts.
There are three options. Skip small words leaves out words like of, the, and, for and in, which acronyms commonly ignore: “Department of Health and Human Services” gives DHHS, not DOHAHS. Add dots gives P.N.G. rather than PNG, which older style guides prefer for some uses. Uppercase capitalises the letters, and with it off, the first letters keep whatever case they had.
The vocabulary of abbreviations
People use these words loosely. A strict acronym is pronounced as a word: NASA, SCUBA, laser. An initialism is said letter by letter: FBI, BBC, USB. Both are abbreviations, and many writers use “acronym” for either. The tool does not care and produces the initial letters for both.
Whether an acronym should be written in capitals is a matter of style. Short ones like USA and BBC are capitals in almost every style guide. Long ones that have become ordinary words, such as radar, laser and scuba, are usually lowercase, and some publications write the ones that are pronounced as words in title case, for instance Nato and Unesco.
When writing your own
Spell out the full phrase on first use, with the acronym in brackets, and use the short form afterwards: “Search engine optimisation (SEO)”. Do not invent an acronym for something used only once or twice, as it makes the reader do extra work for nothing. Check that your acronym does not already mean something else in your field, or spell something unfortunate.
Working backwards is a game of its own. A backronym starts with a word you like and builds a phrase to fit it, which is how a lot of software and project names come about. The tool cannot invent a clever one for you, but if you have a candidate phrase it shows the letters at once.
For text tools that deal with names and case, the case converter changes how the result is written, the text splitter divides a list of phrases onto separate lines, and the hashtag generator does something similar for social posts. If you want random words to build a phrase from, try the random word generator.