
Ask HN: A kind request please about the use of acronyms? - stephen82
Fellow Hacker News&#x27; readers,<p>I need to confess something: as a non-English speaker, most of the time I&#x27;m embarrassed to ask what that &#x27;X&#x27; or &#x27;Y&#x27; acronym means.<p>To give an example, NLP.<p>Is it 
 * Neuro-Linguistic Programming?
 * Natural Language Processing?
 * Network Layer Protocol?
 * Natural Language Paradigm?<p>...and so on.<p>9 out of 10 times, I have to patiently look for the comments and pray to find an answer somewhere in thread(s) to save myself from embarrassingly asking.<p>Now I have decided to take the risk to do so, as I have accumulated countless of acronyms, thanks to Web Development, and not only lol!<p>Are we getting lazier than ever to type a whole word, let alone a normal sentence, or is it my idea?<p>Can you English-speaking people help us understand your language better?<p>Thank you very much and please accept my apologies in advance if I have offended anyone.
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cyberbanjo
Even as a monolingual native English speaker I absolutely prefer that acronyms
and initialisms are defined before use, at least once.

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t0mmyb0y
If an acronym isn't defined previous to use, or at first use, I consider it a
typo.

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rathel
I second that! Considering how crap Google results are these days, even usual
methods to decode acronyms often turn futile

