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Part of the difference here is that "AIDS," the acronym for the disease, is in all caps to distinguish it from "aids" the word (as in "visual aids," "study aids," etc.). In the case of "radar" and other examples mentioned, there's no other, pre-existing word for it to displace, so there's no potential for confusion when writing it in lower-case.
an acronym that few remember what the letters stand for, such as laser and radar. Generally, once a word becomes so frequently used that its acronymic etymology is less relevant, the capitalization is dropped.
Oct 23, 2014 · Acronyms are formed from the initial letters or parts of words in a sequence, but have the distinction of being pronounceable words, e.g. RADAR, SCUBA. Glottopedia defines alphabetisms as follows: an abbreviation that takes the first letter of each word of the base expression (like an acronym), and is pronounced by spelling out each letter.
Nov 28, 2014 · 18. An acronym is a word formed by the initial letters of other words, such as Nato (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation). Note that this is different to an initialism where the initial letters are spelled out, as in BBC for example. A backronym is where the word comes first, and the initial letters are made to fit the word.
Feb 24, 2014 · There are three polysemic/hyponymic definitions of 'acronym'. The loosest would allow FBI, ISA and radar. Perhaps the most commonly accepted would allow ISA and radar. The strictest I've come across would only allow words that have been assimilated into the lexicon as common nouns, such as radar and laser. There aren't many of these.
Mar 22, 2018 · An acronym is a word. It is neither an abbreviation, nor merely a set of initials; it must be pronounceable as a word. Thus, 'BBC' and 'HTML' are not acronyms. 'ASAP' is pronounced by some people as a two-syllable word and is, therefore, an acronym -- even though other people spell it out as A - S - A - P.
Use all capitals if an abbreviation is pronounced as the individual letters: BBC, VAT, etc; if it is an acronym (pronounced as a word) spell out with initial capital, eg Nasa, Nato, unless it can be considered to have entered the language as an everyday word, such as awol, laser and, more recently, asbo, pin number and sim card.
The answer is sometimes. As Elliott points out in comments, there are many acronyms which have come to be accepted as words. In many cases the original acronym is all but forgotten. (e.g. radar, laser). But, you can make an argument that upon their acceptance as a word, they cease to function as an acronym. This logic is similar to borrowing a ...
Merriam-Webster defines acronym as "a word formed from the initial letter or letters of each of the successive parts or major parts of a compound term (as anzac, radar, snafu)." Strictly speaking, U.N. is an initialism:
Don Taylor. Roaring Fish found another etymology of SNAFU from Don Taylor (wayback). Taylor says in April or May of 1941 (before Pearl Harbor) during radio network training at Camp San Luis Obispo, California, it came from a mechanical coding device that scrambled messages into five letter code groups.
