Post by 🔥🦊 on Jun 1, 2018 16:36:52 GMT
If it is important to you to distinguish between acronyms (NATO, NASA) - meant to be pronounced as words - and initialisms (FBI, TGIF) then by all means, do so. But if you are speaking to or writing for a general audience, it’s not an error to generalize all words and labels created from initials or parts of words under the broad term acronym.
I've seen that argument before on a crossword puzzle forum. They came to the same conclusion. ACRONYM is a widely used term, but you hardly ever hear INITIALISM as a separate category. The BBC makes a style distinction with Nato and Nasa often having only an initial capital.