Have you ever gawked at the fountains at the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas? It’s a magical show of water and music, dancing across nine acres.
The business behind the show is named WET Design, with WET standing for Water Entertainment Technologies. Behind that persuasive name is a team of former Disney “imagineers,” creators of 200 fountains and architectural water displays.
The thinking behind the moniker WET Design illustrates the best in acronyms for company names: They deliver meaning, not just a set of initials, as they avoid a polysyllabic pileup. (“Water Entertainment Technologies” is a 10-syllable mouthful.)
By definition, an acronym is not just a collection of initials. It is a pronounceable word formed from the initial letters of a name. To make the name pronounceable, you need some well-placed vowels:
WAC, for Women’s Army Corps.
QANTAS, from Queensland and Northern Territories Air Service.
NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
An acronym also can be formed by combining the first parts of a series of words:
RADAR, from Radio Detecting and Ranging.
INTERPOL, International Police Organization.
NABISCO, National Biscuit Company. (The “Co.” abbreviation is easy to pronounce and combine, which accounts for its frequent role in acronyms).
As these examples suggest, once an acronym becomes embedded in the language, most people forget – or never bother to learn – the underlying words.
Just ask someone what LASER actually stands for. (Ready? It’s “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.”)
Or GEICO (Government Employees Insurance Company).
But best of all, you’d like the word formed by the letters to have a strong meaning and an immediate relationship to the brand. That’s a home run in acronyms. Consider:
VISTA (Volunteers In Service to America).
MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving).
PLAY (Participate in the Lives of America’s Youth, a Nike-sponsored program).
UNITE is another acronym that aces it, much like WET Design.
When you merge two organizations, you can create a colossal collisions of initials. But sometimes, you can hit that home run. Consider the merger of two big labor unions, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union. The result could have been the mother of all jumbles: The ILGWACTWU. (Pronounced thusly, by Elmer Fudd: “ill-gwak-twooh.”)
But cooler heads prevailed. Their merged identity instead carries a new name and the dandy acronym UNITE: Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees.
