I'm no linguist, but Roger's question got me thinking.  Wouldn't acronym 
be a subset of abbreviation?  We abbreviate in a number of
ways like SMS messages "U r vg" (You are very good), in emails "IMHO" 
(in my humble opinion),by dropping vowels like "Mr" (mister) "Dr"
(doctor), by major pronunciation like "size XL"  (size eXtra Large),
by truncation like "abbrev." (abbreviation),  and certainly by taking
initials like "U.S",  "U.N".

As for "XML", it is certainly an abbreviation.  The question is whether
it is also an acronym (ie, taking initials).  To the extent that only
"ML" are initials and 'X' is selected  more by major pronunciation than
initial, it seems to fail the test for being strictly an acronym.

So perhaps the XML spec is not wrong by saying "XML" is an abbreviation.


Chin Chee-Kai


Mukul Gandhi wrote:
>> Didn't you mean the opposite, that XML is a word made from the initial
>> letters of the phrase "eXtensible Markup Language", and hence an
>> acronym?
>>     
>
> The XML specification, http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/REC-xml-20060816/
>
> starts with,
>
> Extensible Markup Language, abbreviated XML, describes ...
>
> So the spec says, it's an abbreviation ...
>
>