Do you know what TLA stands for? Three Letter Acronym. Then what do you call a four-letter acronym? ETLA—Extended Three Letter Acronym. I’ve heard and read this joke several times now and I like it. It really encapsulates the additive evolution of the interface between humans and technology.

We don’t always design things from the beginning, taking the time to predict (accurately) future changes or issues and account for them from the beginning. The things we do aren’t always uniform and the whole is not always greater than the sum of its parts.

Iterative changes can create awesome things though. The iPhone became so successful not just because it was an early entry to the market, but because every year they just took the same thing and made it a little better instead of gambling on a huge redesign. That slow process of small changes eventually made something great that millions upon millions have purchased.

The world of abbreviations, acronyms and initialisms shows us the glorious discontinuity of civilized life in this way. Things build upon the past. I’d wager that even in our insular utilities-centric industry there are a lot of people that use these shortcuts every day without knowing what they all mean. Its kind of like the iPhone process. Its almost guaranteed that most engineers working on their part of the iPhone know little of how the other parts of it work. Its not efficient for everyone to know everything. Maybe that is why we have so many acronyms?

I’ve assembled a collection of acronyms and initialisms into a few categories as well as a quiz for utilities-specific acronyms and initialisms. (Here is an entry at Grammarist for the different between these things.)

General Category:

AM/PM

Ante Meridiem/Post Meridiem – These Latin words stand for before or after midday.

AM/FM

Amplitude Modulation/Frequency Modulation – How do you think carrier radio waves get that information to your radio receiver? In one of these two ways, generally.

RSVP

Répondez s’il vous plait – ‘Will you attend?’ sounds so barbaric. You might as well use the fancy French way of saying it and class it up.

TASER

Thomas A. Swift’s Electric Rifle – The name comes from a 1911 novel titled Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle. The main character invented and used an electric rifle whilst adventuring through Africa. In 1974 Jack Cover completed his invention and named it with this loose acronym. Apparently, the novel is not conducive to the sensibilities of the modern reader.

LASER

Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation – The first LASER was actually a MAZER. But MAZER isn’t one of the items on this list so you will just have to ponder what the “M” stands for.

SONAR

sound navigation ranging – There are passive and active kinds of sonar. The active kind is the one we hear in movies that involve submarines.

SCUBA

Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus – SCUBA Steve stands for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus.

ZIP

Zone Improvement Plan – USPS chose the acronym when they implemented ZIP codes to sound appropriately speedy to market the idea that adding ZIP codes to the address would speed up delivery times.

Nerdy Tech Category:

HTML

Hypertext Markup Language – The language that defines the layout of most of most websites. Just hit CTRL + U right now for an example. I believe I just found a grammatically correct way to use “of most of most” in a sentence. At least, it makes sense to me.

PNG

Portable Network Graphics – it was created as a free alternative to GIF since at the time GIF was owned by one company that charged licensing fees

JPEG

Joint Photographic Experts Group – Its name came from the group that created it as a standard image format.

GIF

Graphics Interchange Format – Is it a hard “G” or a soft “G”? I’ve used the hard “G” but I have it on good authority (Terry worked a few offices over from the guy who invented the format) it is properly pronounced with a soft “G”.

USB

Universal Serial Bus – The standard hardware interface used to charge devices and transfer data. I don’t know about you all but until they came out with USB-C and we got reversable connectors, I hated USB. With a deep burning passion. Why wouldn’t they make it reversible?

LTE

Long Term Evolution — LTE is a 4G wireless communications standard. It was developed by 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project). The goal was 10x the speed of 3G. 5G is set to be 100 times faster than 4G. If my math is correct that means 5G will be about twenty-seven gazillion times faster than 3G.

CPU

Central Processing Unit – It’s the component in the computer responsible for most command execution and interpretation. You can measure its speed in another acronym (MIPS) that you will just have to use your imagination to decipher. I’ve noticed some people refer to their personal computer as “my CPU” which seems wrong.

CAPTCHA

Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart – Google got these things running. You’ve seen them before. When you go to login to a website and it asks you very existentially “Are you human?” And then makes you click on little pictures with bicycles or cars. This test goes back to the father of computing—Alan Turing.

Nerdy GIS Category:

SDE

Spatial DataBase Engine – The database technology from Esri that serves as a foundation for managing geospatial data in a multi-user environment. It used to be referred to as SDBE when it was designed by the company GTI, but became ArcSDE after Esri purchased a different company that had taken over developing a production version.

NAD

North American Datum – A formal description of the shape of the Earth that uses an anchor point. The farther things get away from this anchor point, the less accurate the description becomes due to the imperfections in that description. Thus, this anchor point was placed at a triangulation station in the 47^th best state in the Union (Kansas) due to that location’s proximity to the geographic center of the continent. That was in 1901. Since then it has been updated in 1927 and 1983 as more data was collected to minimize discrepancies. Now our GIS data uses this and other datum to place them on this, our wonderful hollow Earth.

WGS

World Geodetic System – A standard, or unified, geodetic system used to spatially describe the Earth. The current revision is WGS 84 which was updated in 2004. It includes a whole bunch of things and is the standard for GPS. It referenced the Earth’s center of mass and is thought to be accurate within 2cm!

DEM
Digital Elevation Model – A 3D CG representation of a terrain’s surface. They are the most common basis for digitally produced relief maps. They can be represented as a raster or a vector network. Types include digital surface models and digital terrain models.

ESRI

Environmental Systems Research Institute – You know you’re supposed to pronounce it ‘ezree’ instead of saying the individual letters like such “E-S-R-I” correct? But old-schoolers still spell it out by accident all the time.

KML

Keyhole Markup Language – An XML notation file for describing geographic stuff. A KMZ is just a zipped up KML file. Google Earth reads and writes to KML files.

LiDAR

Light Detection and Ranging – It’s pretty much radar with light instead of radio waves. A “laser” is transmitted towards a survey area and the light particles (photons) are scattered back to the receiver. The received scattered light can then be detected and interpreted to create a collection of distances between the survey area and the transmitter, which together is used to produce things like maps and models.

UTC

Coordinated Universal Time – UTC is a time standard. Before to 1972, it was referred to as GMT (Greenwich Mean Time). This is one of my favorites because instead of abbreviating it as CUT they went with UTC because the French version would be TUC (Temps Universel Coordonné) and they wanted one abbreviation for everyone.