Decoding acronyms

Sometimes you want to know the meaning of an acronym. Perhaps it’s new, or perhaps it’s jargon — a term used within a particular community or subculture.

There are two ways to go here. You could look it up on a comprehensive site such as The Free Dictionary, where you may get dozens of possible meanings. Take a look at this Free Dictionary search for the acronym OP, for example.

Or, you could look it up at the Urban Dictionary. A Uclue user, willdeans, describes the advantage of this approach:

People submit their own definitions and then vote on the definition. As a result, the most common uses of an acronym become immediately clear. Chances are the definition you are looking for will be in the top few

Thanks, Will!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 at 4:31 pm by eiffel and is filed under Research Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.