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Sometimes, we receive mail from language purist that (correctly) point out that what we collect here are not, for the most part, acronyms but abbreviations. Let's take a look at the definitions (from the Merriam-Webster dictionary, http://www.webster.com):
acronym: a word (as NATO, radar, or snafu) formed from the initial letter or letters of each of the successive parts or major parts of a compound term.
abbreviation: a shortened form of a written word or phrase used in place of the whole (amt is an abbreviation for amount).
The fact is, in the information technology context people tend to use the term "acronym" in a broad sense, i.e. encompassing abbreviations. As an empirical demonstration, people who come to this site using a search engine and searching for "acronyms" account for nearly 99% of all visits originating from a search.
When in this site you encounter the word "acronym" we mean any term that results from consecutively taking some letters from a definition.
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