Tips for Crafting Your First Recursive Acronym

Writing a recursive acronym is a rite of passage for some and a trivial (potentially asinine) pursuit for others. What follows is a very casual analysis of some existing recursive acronyms as well as some strategies you could use when trying to craft your own. Additionally, The cheat sheets at the end of the post have some reference information to help construct your first recursive acronym.

What is a recursive acronym?

So you have decided that you want to write your first recursive acronym, but for some reason have no idea what one is? Luckily for you and the SEO gods, a definition is incoming. Recursive acronyms are acronyms which reference themselves. They are also sometimes referred to as self-referential acronyms. Techopedia defines a recursive acronym as follows:

A recursive acronym embeds a copy of itself within the acronym. One of the best known examples is Richard Stallman's GNU project. GNU stands for "GNU's Not Unix." That copy in turn contains the word GNU, so the acronym is infinitely recursive. In GNU's case, the acronym is a play on words: GNU is not Unix in the sense that it does not have any code dating to the original Bell Labs Unix, but the behavior of GNU attempts to mimic Unix systems as closely as possible.¹

Now that we have a firm grasp of where we are going, let's begin our quest to create a recursive acronym by visiting the end.

Tip No. 1 - Start at the End

Start at the finish line--that sounds easy enough, right? The truth is, it's pretty difficult to have an acronym reference itself if the acronym doesn't already exist. It is common to have an acronym in mind and then fit a recursive meaning into it² (similar to a backronym).

If you don't already have a word or acronym in mind to retroactively fit meaning into, you still have some choices available.

Wikipedia has a decent list of recursive acronym examples which we can use to identify some patterns. Note these common recursive acronym structures:

Start	Middle	End
References itself	State (it is or isn't something)	What is isn't or is
References itself	Action	What it does

If you know what the subject of your recursive acronym does or is, then you can work backwards in assembling your recursive acronym. For example, if your subject is a library or a framework, you can try generating some acronyms with L or F as the final characters.

Tip No. 2 - The Middle is for State or Action

Review the following selection of popular recursive acronyms...notice a pattern?

Acronym	Stands For	Has Is?	Hidden is?
cUrl	Curl URL Request Library	no	no
EINE	EINE Is Not Emacs	yes	no
FIJI	FIJI is Just ImageJ	yes	no
GNU	Gnu's Not Unix	yes	yes
MINT	MINT Is Not TRAC	yes	no
Nano	Nano's Another Editor	yes	yes
LAME	LAME Ain't an MP3 Encoder	no	no
PIP	PIP Installs Packages	no	no
WINE	Wine Is Not an Emulator	yes	no
YAML	YAML Aint Markup Language	no	no

A whopping 60% of them have the state is either explicitly or hidden behind a contraction. It's incredibly popular to state what your recursive acronym either is (Nano, Fiji,) or is not (gnu, wine, MINT, EINE). Interestingly enough, it is popular to say what the acronym isn't, even while avoiding "is not" as with YAML and LAME both stating what they aint.

With this in mind, if you know what your recursive acronym isn't--then consider I, IN, or A for your middle initials. If you already have the middle characters reserved, then don't be afraid to use a contraction to sneak is into your definition like in the example with both gnu & nano.

Cheat Sheet

While not being a rule, it is very likely that your recursive acronym will end with a noun. As such, it is very likely that your middle character(s) will need to be verbs³.

Verbs Beginning with a Vowel

Action Verbs

Vowel	verb
A	Answers
A	Approves
A	Arranges
E	Edits
E	Enters
E	Exits
I	Imitates
I	Invents
U	Understands

Linking Verbs

Vowel	verb
A	Appears
I	Is

Verbs Beginning with a Consonant

Action Verbs

Consonant	verb
B	Breaks
B	Builds
B	Buys
C	Colors
C	Creates
C	Completes
D	Describes
D	Draws
L	Listens
P	Paints
P	Plans
P	Plays
R	Reads
R	Replaces
R	Runs
S	Sleeps
S	Solves
S	Study
Z	Zips

Linking Verbs

Consonant	verb
B	Become
G	Grow
L	Look
R	Remain
S	Stay

Technical Nouns

This certainly is not an exhaustive list of technical nouns, but hopefully my spit-balling here is enough to get your creative juices flowing. Obviously recursive acronyms can exist outside the software engineering domain, but nobody out there seems to be interested in creating them :).

• Encoder
• Decoder
• Framework
• Library
• Processor
• Package
• Emulator
• Simulator
• Editor
• System

Don't be afraid to use proper nouns either. Many existing recursive acronyms explicitly call out what they are or aren't in relation to specific things--EINE, MINT & even GNU demonstrate this.

Conclusion

Attempting to write a recursive acronym is a fun & tricky pursuit. This blog post is a really casual musing, I am certain that there are more interesting patterns & strategies to uncover. Hopefully the tools and perspectives presented here help you along in your goal of creating a recursive acronym.

Footnotes

Footnotes

1. Accessed 1/16/2022. https://www.techopedia.com/definition/21636/recursive-acronym ↩

2. Accessed 1/16/2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursive_acronym

   Recursive acronyms typically form backwardly: either an existing ordinary acronym is given a new explanation of what the letters stand for, or a name is turned into an acronym by giving the letters an explanation of what they stand for, in each case with the first letter standing recursively for the whole acronym.

   ↩

3. I built the selected lists of verbs from this list Accessed 1/16/2022. ↩