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Κουίνιον:
A backronym (sometimes “bacronym”) is a reverse acronym. To create one, you take a word that isn't an acronym and turn it into one.
Some backronyms are designed as mnemonics. A classic example is the Apgar score for testing the health of newborns. It was named after the American physician Virginia Apgar but to help student doctors and nurses remember the system, it has been changed to the acronym "Appearance, Pulse, Grimace, Activity, and Respiration". Similarly, the US Amber Alert programme is said to mean "America's Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response", though it was actually named after a missing child, Amber Hagerman.
Backronyms are frequently humorous — Microsoft's Bing, some quip, is actually an acronym for "Because It's Not Google"; world-weary sailors say "navy" really means "Never Again Volunteer Yourself". Many of this type are actually reinterpreted acronyms, included by courtesy in the backronym collection because nobody has yet come up with a different "-nym" for them. For example, NTSC, the American television standard, became "Never Twice the Same Colour".
Others are folk etymology: "posh" doesn't stand for "Port Out, Starboard Home". "Wiki", the Hawaiian word that turns up in such sites as Wikipedia, doesn't mean "What I Know Is". "Golf" wasn't created from "Gentlemen Only Ladies Forbidden". SOS doesn't stand for "Save Our Souls" or "Save Our Ship", or indeed anything at all, since it was chosen as a particularly memorable and easily recognised Morse code sequence.
Meredith Williams, in an entry to a competition in The Washington Post on 8 November 1983, seems to have coined "bacronym", as a portmanteau of "back" and "acronym". Previously, lexicographer Ben Zimmer tells me, the form was called, somewhat cumbersomely, a "prefabricated acronym" or a "reverse acronym". "Backronym" was popularised in July 1994 by another contest, in New Scientist, though "backronym" was then said to be a reinterpreted acronym, neither the original nor the current principal sense.