25 of the Most Confusing Acronyms and Initialisms

Acronyms and initialisms are a great way to save time on writing or saying unwieldy phrases, from graphics interchange format (GIF) to deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Many of us know how it feels to not recognize an abbreviation and ask the internet to fill in the blanks.

Letter Solver recently conducted a study to find out which ones people Google the most. First, researchers compiled a list of nearly 170 popular acronyms and initialisms across five different categories: dating, gaming, business, technology, and U.S. state abbreviations. They then ranked them based on the average monthly search volume for that term plus the word meaning (or, for U.S. states, the question “What state is [abbreviation]”).

It’s not a foolproof survey. For one thing, it’s impossible to prove that every person who searches “KPI meaning,” for example, is trying to find out what the letters KPI stand for. Some people might already know they’re short for key performance indicator, and they’re looking for an actual definition of that concept. 

Moreover, some abbreviations are short for more than one phrase and/or are used in more than one context. ASL can refer to American Sign Language or age/sex/location—a quick way to solicit those details from someone in chat rooms and other virtual spaces. Letter Solver classified ASL in the dating category, but it’s likely that at least some of its 87,000 average monthly searches involve American Sign Language.

MVP is a similar story: It can stand for most valuable player, so Letter Solver listed it under gaming. That said, not only is MVP (in the most valuable player sense) used widely outside the world of video games, but it can also be short for minimum viable product—a bare-bones yet functional prototype of a product that clients can test in order to inform further development. So it’s possible that some search volume that belongs in the business or tech category is padding MVP’s performance in the gaming section of this study.

You can definitely argue that these ambiguities support that MVP, ASL, and other multifaceted abbreviations belong on a list of the most confusing ones—but this particular ranking wasn’t based on the number of phrases a single abbreviation stands for, nor the number of contexts in which you can use it.

But it’s still interesting to see what people are Googling even if we don’t know exactly what they’re referring to or how to classify the searches. Plus, plenty of the terms are pretty unambiguous: It’s probably safe to assume that CEO, for instance, almost always stands for chief executive officer.

It’s also worth noting the difference between acronyms and initialisms. An acronym is an abbreviation pronounced as a word—like SCUBA, which is technically short for self-contained underwater breathing apparatus. If you say the individual letters in the abbreviation—like CEO, MVP, and nearly all the other terms in Letter Solver’s survey, it’s an initialism.

See the top five terms in each category below, and find out what other abbreviations made the lists here.

U.S. States

Business

Tech

Dating

Gaming