Three-letter acronym

Three Letter Acronym.

TLA is the most popular type of acronym in computing terminology.

There are 26³ = 17576 possible acronyms, and probably most of them are already used.

If we allowed numbers, special characters, or were case-sensitive, many more TLAs could be created.

Many TLAs have more than one meaning.

There even are TLAs with more than 10 meanings (for example: SDI has at least 11 meanings).

Many acronyms have more than one full-form with the same meaning. For example GCC was first 'GNU C Compiler',

and later 'GNU Compiler Collection'.

Because on DOS only 3-letter file extensions (on DOS extension usually marked file type) were allowed,

many longer acronyms were shorten to 3-letters (for example JPEG to JPG, HTML to HTM).

One big source of acronyms are short forms of Usenet groups. For example pra for pl.rec.anime.

Popular TLAs: