HIPAA (pronounced "hippa") begins with a consonant sound, so a HIPAA form is correct. HIV (pronounced "aitch eye vee") begins with a vowel sound, so an HIV patient is correct. The trick here is to use your ears (how the acronym is pronounced), not your eyes (how it's spelled). The general rule for indefinite articles is to use a before consonants and an before vowels. How do you tell whether to use a or an with abbreviations? I assume that an abbreviation is treated just as if it were a word, but I'm having trouble with some examples: Should it be an HIV patient or a HIV patient ? For some reason, neither one looks right to me.
^ Dan Gookin (1992) The Microsoft Guide to Optimizing Windows page 211.^ On the cruelty of really teaching computer science.Hull (1982) An Introduction to the new Productivity Information Management System page 176 ^ Steven Vickers ZX81 Basic Programming, Sinclair Research Limited, page 161 "As you can see, everything has a three letter abbreviation (TLA)."."Literary Metaphors and Other Linguistic Innovations in Computer Language".
"Mnemonic Three-Letter Acronyms for the Families of Vascular Plants: A Device for More Effective Herbarium Curation". All taxa indicated by three-letter acronyms with strains indicated by a fourth letter if necessary. "Chromosomal Differentiation and the Sources of the South American Species of Epilobium (Onagraceae)".
The acronyms DSE and DNA have something in common: each is a three-letter acronym. The initials stand for 'The TTP Project.' This is also an example of a recursive acronym. In the comic strip Dilbert the title character is working on a project called TTP."Extended three-letter acronym" is sometimes abbreviated to "XTLA". The Jargon File also mentions the abbreviation "ETLA" for "extended three-letter acronym" to refer to four-letter acronyms/abbreviations.Paul's straight-faced response was: "There are only 17,000 three-letter acronyms." According to the Jargon File, a journalist once asked hacker Paul Boutin what he thought the biggest problem in computing in the 1990s would be.In 1999, the author Douglas Adams remarked: "The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it's short for.".As early as 1967, the musical Hair included the song "Initials", whose final verse consisted only of TLAs, viz: " LBJ IRT USA LSD.In standard English, "WWW" is sometimes abbreviated to "dubdubdub" in speech. An additional 26 × 26 × 10 = 6760 can be produced if the third position is allowed to be a digit 0-9, giving a total of 24,336. The number of possible three-letter abbreviations using the 26 letters of the alphabet from A to Z (AAA, AAB. "No endeavour is respectable these days without a TLA" By 1992 it was in a Microsoft handbook. In 1988, in a paper titled "On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computing Science", eminent computer scientist Edsger W. The specific generation of three-letter acronyms in computing was mentioned in a JPL report of 1982.
In 1980, the manual for the Sinclair ZX81 home computer used and explained TLA. They are used in many other fields, but the term TLA is particularly associated with computing. Three-letter acronyms were used as mnemonics in biological sciences, from 1977 and their practical advantage was promoted by Weber in 1982. The exact phrase three-letter acronym appeared in the sociology literature in 1975. Air Navigation Services ( ANS): SAR, AIS, FPC, ATM, MET, CNS, ASM, ATS, ATC, FIS.Political Parties: BJP, CCP, GOP and AAP.State postal abbreviations: NSW, QLD, VIC and TAS (Australia).Sports organizations: NFL, MLB, (North America) AFL and NRL (Australia) NPB (Japan) ACB, LFP (Spain) IPL (India), EPL (England), WBO.Musical groups: R.E.M., XTC, TLC, E.L.O., MC5, GBH, O.A.R., MDC, D.R.I., JFA.Wars and political conflicts: HYW and WWI.Chemistry, biology, pharmaceuticals: GMO, LSD and MSG.Personal advertisements: SBM for Single Black Male, STR for Short Term Relationship.Television networks: ABC ( Aus., U.S.), BBC (UK), CBC ( Canada, Japan), and NHK (Japan).Three Letter Agencies: CIA, FBI, CBI, FSB, and NSA.Business: CEO, CFO and other C-level officers.Computer phrases: CPU, DOS, RAM, ROM, and GNU.Famous people: FDR, JFK, MLK, OBL, RBG, RDJ and MJK.Countries: SRI, USA, CAR, UAE, DRC, etc.