> looking for initialisms, not acronyms

Imprecise wording, initialisms are a case of acronyms, it's not either or.

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/page/abbreviations-acronyms-initia...

"an initialism is an acronym that is pronounced as individual letters"

https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-fiction/abbreviat...

"As such, acronyms are initialisms."

Wait, am I crazy or are these two articles saying the exact opposite thing about which class is the parent one?

The CDC one seems to say that initialisms are a class of acronym, but the Writers Digest one says acronyms are a class of initialism.

The CDC link says they are two separate classes (one is pronounced as a word, the other one is pronounced by reading the letters)

The Writer's Digest link says that initialisms are the parent class, and that acronyms are the special case of specifically pronouncing the letters as a word.

So, root comment is correct (gwern is looking for initialisms) and GP is incorrect (initialisms are not a subset of acronyms in either definition linked by GP).

> initialisms are not a subset of acronyms

https://www.dictionary.com/e/acronym-vs-abbreviation/

"Initialisms are types of acronyms."

As far as I can tell, the CDC is also stating an is-a relationship:

> an initialism is an acronym that is pronounced as individual letters

But it contradicts their earlier definition:

> an acronym is made up of parts of the phrase it stands for and is pronounced as a word

I think their guideline is badly written.

It's written like this:

> There are vehicles, bicycles and motorbikes. A vehicle takes you from point A to point B. A bicycle is a human-powered transportation device. A motorbike is a bicycle propelled by an engine. For the purposes of this article, all three will be called "vehicles" in the rest of the text.

They're not saying "an initialism is part of the class Acronym, with added details", they're saying "an initialism is basically like the class Acronym, but pronunciation (which was how we defined Acronyms) is different.

I read those the same way. In any case, both acronyms and initialisms are individual subsets of abbreviations.

TIL