As a non-profit website, the Abbreviation Finder is a searchable database of more than 700,000 abbreviations and acronyms about computers, technology, telecommunications, and the military. Over the years, the site has received numerous awards.

Abbreviation Finder is not a glossary of terms, web search engine, or dictionary or a thesaurus — it is only designed to search for and expand acronyms and abbreviations.

If you don’t find an acronym or abbreviation in the database, but know its meaning, you may suggest it be added here. If it meets our guidelines, it will be reviewed, verified, edited, and added to our database in our next update (usually several times a week).

Abbreviation Finder currently has over 700,000 human-edited definitions for acronyms and abbreviations. The site receives over 3 million unique visitors from more than 200 countries each month and serves over 12 million page views.

Abbreviation Finder is a trusted ready reference resource at thousands of schools, libraries, and government websites. Yahoo reports over 1 million links to Abbreviation Finder, more than all other similar websites combined. By any measure, it is an “authority” website, trusted by schools, libraries, universities, governments, the defense industry, and translators and interpreters worldwide.

What’s an Acronym?

An acronym is a pronounceable word formed from each of the first letters of a descriptive phrase or by combining the initial letters or parts of words from the phrase. Here are some examples of acronyms:

New York City = NYC

As Soon As Possible = ASAP

An acronym is actually a type of abbreviation. Our database contains abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms and we make no distinction between them in our database or on our site. We are more interested in defining “acronyms” for you than we are in trying to properly distinguish between abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms.

Though you sometimes see acronyms or abbreviations written with periods after each letter (e.g., U.K.), we don’t use that form here. When entering search terms, don’t include the periods.

Abbreviation Finder in the Press

“…Try Abbreviation Finder. They have millions of acronyms across a wide range of topics. These abbreviations are carefully edited and maintained by human editors.”