A three-letter acronym ( TLA ), or three-letter abbreviation , is as the phrase suggests an abbreviation consisting of three letters. The abbreviation for TLA, TLA, has a special status among abbreviations and to some is humorous since abbreviations that are three-letters long are very common and TLA is, in fact, a TLA.
13-602: SCT , a three-letter acronym , may refer to: Businesses and organizations [ edit ] Scientific Cutting Tools , a U.S. manufacturer of carbide cutting tools Save China's Tigers , an international organisation that aims to save South China tigers SCT Logistics , a transport company in Australia Secretariat of Communications and Transportation (Mexico) , Mexico's federal ministry of transportation and communications Slovenija ceste Tehnika , formerly
26-485: A Microsoft handbook. The number of possible three-letter abbreviations using the 26 letters of the alphabet from A to Z (AAA, AAB, ... to ZZY, ZZZ) is 26 × 26 × 26 = 17,576. Allowing a single digit 0-9 increases this by 26 × 26 × 10 = 6,760 for each position, such as 2FA , P2P , or WW2 , giving a total of 37,856 such three-character strings. Out of the 17,576 possible TLAs that can be created using 3 uppercase letters, at least 94% of them had been used at least once in
39-450: A dataset of 18 million scientific article abstracts. Three-letter acronyms are the most common type of acronym in scientific research papers, with acronyms of length 3 being twice as common as those of length 2 or 4. In standard English , WWW is the TLA whose pronunciation requires the most syllables —typically nine. The usefulness of a TLA typically comes from its being quicker to say than
52-670: A kind of tumor SCT (gene) , gene for a human hormone secretin Scutum , a constellation Semi-Conductor Tracker, part of the Inner Detector in the ATLAS experiment Signed Certificate Timestamps, a part of Certificate Transparency Systems-centered therapy , a type of psychotherapy also frequently utilized in organizational development Social cognitive theory , a psychological theory about learning through observation Medicine [ edit ] Sluggish cognitive tempo,
65-478: A potentially new attention disorder, see Cognitive disengagement syndrome Stem cell transplantation, see Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation Other uses [ edit ] Scotland , per BS 6879 standard Sentence completion tests SEPA Credit Transfer, a standardised pan-European payment instrument used across the Single Euro Payments Area or SEPA Seychelles Time ,
78-544: A time zone used in the Seychelles Signed certificate timestamp, a timestamp returned by the certificate transparency log when a valid digital certificate is submitted Socotra Airport , on a Yemeni island of Socotra in the Indian Ocean Survival craft transceiver , a type of handheld radiotelephone used for maritime on-scene rescue communication YAKINDU Statechart Tools , software for
91-463: A word) such as CAT (as in CAT scan) which is pronounced as the animal . The exact phrase three-letter acronym appeared in the sociology literature in 1975. Three-letter acronyms were used as mnemonics in biological sciences, from 1977 and their practical advantage was promoted by Weber in 1982. They are used in many other fields, but the term TLA is particularly associated with computing. In 1980,
104-478: Is different from Wikidata All article disambiguation pages All disambiguation pages Three-letter acronym TLA is autological . Most TLAs are initialisms (the initial letter of each word of a phrase), but most are not acronyms in the strict sense since they are pronounced by saying each letter, as in APA / ˌ eɪ p iː ˈ eɪ / AY -pee- AY . Some are true acronyms (pronounced as
117-461: The biggest Slovenian construction company Southampton Container Terminals , a port operator in Southampton, England Sree Chitra Thirunal College of Engineering , Kerala, India Suffolk County Transit , a bus system that serves Suffolk County, New York Systems & Computer Technology Corp. , which was acquired by SunGard Science [ edit ] Sacrococcygeal teratoma ,
130-522: The manual for the Sinclair ZX81 home computer used and explained TLA. The specific generation of three-letter acronyms in computing was mentioned in a JPL report of 1982. In 1988, in a paper titled "On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computing Science", eminent computer scientist Edsger W. Dijkstra wrote (disparagingly), "No endeavour is respectable these days without a TLA" By 1992 it was in
143-464: The phrase it represents; however saying 'WWW' in English requires three times as many syllables as the phrase it is meant to abbreviate (World Wide Web). "WWW" is sometimes abbreviated to "dubdubdub" in speech. Autological word An autological word (or homological word ) expresses a property that it also possesses. For example, the word "word" is a word, the word "English" is in English,
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#1732775733856156-540: The specification and development of reactive, event-driven systems See also [ edit ] S. Ct. Topics referred to by the same term [REDACTED] This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the title SCT . If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article. Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=SCT&oldid=1250502588 " Category : Disambiguation pages Hidden categories: Short description
169-499: The word "writable" is writable, and the word " pentasyllabic " has five syllables. The opposite, a heterological word , does not apply to itself. For example, the word "palindrome" is not a palindrome , "long" is a short word, "monosyllabic" has more than one syllable, "hyphenated" is not hyphenated, and, inversely, "non-hyphenated" is hyphenated. Unlike more general concepts of autology and self-reference, this particular distinction and opposition of autological and heterological words
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