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Missed the original broadcast. I like "multipliterals" or "acrotuples."

#11, Harris from Harlem:
In your second list, all but "SPAM" are called "acronyms". So are "radar" (RAdio Detection And Ranging) and "loran" (LOng RAnge Navigation).

An acronym is a word made from the initial letters OR GROUPS OF LETTERS of other words.

I'd call "SPAM" a portmanteau word, like "alcoholic" and "blogiversary".

Sorry I missed the original segment. I have a write-in vote: "Repetation." Easy to pronounce, easy to remember, will handle repeated letters as well as numbers.

Allen

There are two other categories:

1. A replicated letter is replaced by a number that represents the count of the replications:
the World Wide Web Consortium == W3C.

2. A long string of letters in the middle of a word is replaced by the count of the letters: internationalization == i18n; globalization == g11n.

I have no names for these, but they differ from "AAA", which is still *written* as "AAA", even though we say "triple-A".

How about calling them symboliphones?

There must also be a category that covers organizations running away from what their initials used to stand for, namely AARP. Today, AARP stands for absolutely nothing at all. Check their website.

Whatever name you give it, I'd say examples like NAACP or IEEE are hybrids, since only some of the letters doubled or triple. I've also heard NAACP & NCAA pronouced as pure initialisms.

I suggest we call it:

Numernyms or Numericalnyms since numbers are used to discribe the word.

Other examples:

- NAACP (N double-A CP)
- NCAA (N C double-A)
- AAMCO (Double-A M C O)

By the way, what do we call the new word that is made from using more than just the first letter of each word but is still pronounced as a word? For Example:

- NABISCO (National Biscuit Company)
- NECCO (New England Confectionary Company)
- SPAM (Spiced Ham)
- SYSCO (Systems and Services Company)
- SUNOCO (Sun Oil Company)

Borrowing from barely remembered high school math and poetry, "Triple AAA" is a "terminating, repeating, alliterative acronym." But this is a truly ugly phrase.

Since a "number" of repeating letters is used, how about "number" + "acronym" = "numnym?"

Or, for sameness, "monotonous" + "acronym" = "mononym?"

If we could just teach computer science's regular expression pattern mini-language (understandable by people who use APIs) to the general population, then we would not even need to give a name to something like "Triple AAA", we could just state the generic pattern. But I'm sure something like this impossible, like getting David Byrne to wear his bicycle helmet 100% of the time!

Suggestion for the new category: collapsism

Example in the same category as AAA: IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)

Examples of another new category?: ISO9000. Seems to blend an acroynm with simthing more literal.

Triple A us an initialism, that is, unless NAACP isn't.

"Triple A" = an Acroname

another example I can think of is the Long Island Railroad. Lots of people call it the "L. I. Double R."

"Triple A" for AAA : Descriptograph

Call something like "Triple A" a 'descriptik", because it describes what you're looking at when you see "AAA".

I like 'numerism,' since it refers to the numbers of initials. Eh? Eh?

Mnemocronyms --- because it's easier to remember or say "triple A" than AAA.

Another example:
Institut National de Physique Nucléaire et de Physique des Particules, a french physics institute. It's abbreviated INPNPP, but called "I N two P three."

There also needs to be a word for initialisms that are longer to say than the phrase they are a shortened version of. Example: WWW, which is 9 syllables, short for World Wide Web, which is only 3.