Originally Posted by thumpism

While we're at it (hey, I didn't start this) an acronym is a word made up of the first or first few letters of a string of words that is then pronounced as a word. Scuba (Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus), Radar (RAdio Detecting And Ranging) and words like that are true acronyms. Something like N.O.S. is not while DOS (from Disk Operating System) is. If you pronounced N.O.S./NOS as "noss" it would be, but you don't so it ain't; nor is DVD, LBS, BSO or any in which the individual letters are pronounced. Those are more correctly letterisms or initialisms.

Thanks for your patience.

RANS, by the way, differs in that it is not an acronym but a portmanteau formed by the first and last names of the company's founder, RANdy Schlitter. A new word formed by combining elements of two different words, as is the word "smog."