recursive acronym

recursive acronym

(convention)

A hackish (and especially MIT) tradition is to choose acronyms and abbreviations that refer humorously to themselves or to other acronyms or abbreviations. The classic examples were two MIT editors called EINE ("EINE Is Not Emacs") and ZWEI ("ZWEI Was EINE Initially"). More recently, there is a Scheme compiler called LIAR (Liar Imitates Apply Recursively), and GNU stands for "GNU's Not Unix!" - and a company with the name CYGNUS, which expands to "Cygnus, Your GNU Support".

See also mung.

recursive acronym

An acronym that is also one of the primary words in the definition. For example, GNU stands for "GNU's Not Unix." Wine means "Wine Is Not an Emulator." See recursion, GNU and Wine.