Why is the acronym for sport utility vehicle (SUV) capitalized but for miles per gallon (mpg) it is lowercased?
5
-
Acronyms which are "pronounceable" (SUV, CAT scan, PIN number,...) are much more likely to be capitalised than mpg, rpm, cpu,... This is a convenience to the reader, - who needs to recognise if something is an acronym rather that a "normal" word. Obviously he doesn't normally need any such help to realise that those lower-case acronyms can't possibly be normal words.– FumbleFingersCommented Feb 22, 2023 at 12:35
-
1@FumbleFingers - does anyone say 'suv', rhyming with 'love', I guess? I only hear ess-you-vee.– Michael HarveyCommented Feb 22, 2023 at 14:01
-
It's essentially American, so I'd rarely hear it anyway. But I don't know of any consistent principle explaining why CAT scans and PIN numbers are usually pronounced as if they were words, but SUV vehicles are usually "spelled" out. Unless it's just that cat and pin are already words (and I can't think of some similar terms that either are or aren't words as well as acronyms, to check that one out! :)– FumbleFingersCommented Feb 22, 2023 at 17:25
-
@FumbleFingers - I can think of Nasa, Nato, the Baftas, ASCII, Unicef, and the Americans have POTUS, FLOTUS, and SCOTUS that are not words. Nobody said BOAC as 'boke', which might have been due to their smooth flights. I note that many UK style guides prefer e.g. Nasa to NASA, etc.– Michael HarveyCommented Feb 22, 2023 at 17:40
-
I'm not great at getting NGrams to do calculations, but I think this AmE chart and this BrE chart are telling us that fully-capitalised NASA is 10 times more likely (relative to Nasa) in the AmE corpus than the BrE one. (Or maybe it's just that Americans refer to nasa more often than Brits, I dunno! :)– FumbleFingersCommented Feb 22, 2023 at 17:49
Add a comment
|
1 Answer
Acronyms - stand for a series of words, e.g. SUV = Sports Utility Vehicle
Units - When there is a series of letters indicating units of measurement, the decision about whether to capitalise or not depends on how the unit is conventionally written on its own.
m = miles, p = per, h = hour ---> miles per hour = mph
m = metres, / = per, s = second ---> m/s
joules = J, / = per, second = s ---> joule per second = J/s
milli = m, electron = e, volt = V ---> milli-electronvolt = meV
Mega = M, electron = e, volt = V ---> Mega-electronvolt = MeV
answered Feb 22, 2023 at 0:50
