From the course: The 33 Laws of Typography

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18 Set acronyms and initialisms in small caps

18 Set acronyms and initialisms in small caps

From the course: The 33 Laws of Typography

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18 Set acronyms and initialisms in small caps

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- Law 18, Set Acronyms and Initialisms in Small Caps. Acronyms are abbreviations formed from the initial letters of other words, and acronyms are pronounced as words. Initialisms are also abbreviations that are formed from the initial letters of other words, but initialisms are not pronounced as words. They're pronounced as separate letters. Examples of acronyms are NASA, which stands for National Aeronautics and Space Administration, ASCII, which stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, NATO, which stands for North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and ASAP which stands for as soon as possible. And you can see we took the first letter of each of these words and strung it together to form an abbreviation which we pronounce as a word. Examples of initialisms are CIA, which stands for Central Intelligence Agency, and here, instead of reading CIA as a word, we pronounce each separate letter, and that's what makes this an initialism. FBI, which stands for Federal Bureau…

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