Friday, September 12, 2008

Recursive acronyms

Anybody with a non-trivial interest in computer science must be familiar with recursive acronyms: acronym whose expansion contains the abbreviation itself. Most famous of them is probably GNU: GNU's Not Unix.
Some other interesting and famous ones:
  • CYGNUS: Cygnus, Your GNU Support
  • LAME: Lame Ain't an MP3 Encoder
  • PNG: PNG's Not GIF
  • WINE: Wine's Not an Emulator
Thanks to Wikipedia for this list.
But one that beats them all is XINU: Xinu Is Not Unix. It is not only a recursive acronym, but also an anagram!


2 comments:

Ashwin said...

I didn't know the one about PNG! :-)

Anonymous said...

PNG is now Portable Network Graphics !