Acronymic Question

[dewline]

A question for my reporter/journalist friendlisters, particularly the ones outside of North America: why do I often see acronyms not having every initial capitalized?

"Nasa" as opposed to "NASA", for example, or "Nafta" instead of "NAFTA"?

Comments

[ffutures]

Stupidity/ignorance is usually a good explanation.

Sometimes you see it the other way, e.g. you often see Hydra written as HYDRA despite not being an acronym.

[dewline]

I write "HYDRA" that way because of the original edition of the Marvel Universe Handbook.

[jo]

From the BBC style guide (easy to find if you google):

Use the abbreviated form of a title without explanation only if there is no chance of any misunderstanding (eg UN, Nato, IRA, BBC). Otherwise, spell it out in full at first reference, or introduce a label (eg the public sector union Unite).

Where you would normally say the abbreviation as a string of letters - an initialism - use all capitals with no full stops or spaces (eg FA, UNHCR, NUT). However, our style is to use lower case with an initial cap for acronyms, where you would normally pronounce the set of letters as a word (eg Aids, Farc, Eta, Nafta, Nasa, Opec, Apec).

There are a few exceptions:

the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence is capped up ie NICE
the UK Independence Party is capped up ie UKIP
Strategic Health Authority becomes SHA (‘Sha’ looks like a typo)
Seasonal Affective Disorder becomes SAD (‘Sad’ would be confusing).

[dewline]

I've seen the online editions of the BBC News and Guardian style guides. What I wonder is why they've made that choice in each of those cases (and apparently, it's the rule in some Swedish publications as well)...

[jo]

Likely because the more familiar the acronym is as an actual word, the more sense it makes to treat it as a word rather than an acronym. Like scuba. Which is an acronym but no one would ever write it SCUBA anymore. No one uses "Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome" -- it's just Aids, like cancer, or Polio, etc.