Mine is OOO for Out Of Office. I always misread it in my head like a ghost and it takes me a few seconds to process. It also doesn’t translate to speech—you have to say the whole thing.
Interested to see if others have similar acronyms they beef with.
Don’t have a least favourite.
But my favourite is WYSIWYG has been mine for 20 years now, it’s so fun to say.
It stands for “What You See Is What You Get” and was used for visual editing programs where you could move things around and the final product would reflect that.
For those who don’t know, much of the reason WYSIWYG is so fun is because the accepted pronunciation is “whizzy-wig”!
As a term it rarely gets used any longer, because “visual editors” are now the norm, where once they were the rarity.
Before visual editors, you’d have content on a screen like a document which you could only see how it would actually look by physically printing it onto a piece of paper. This is because the printer itself knew about fonts and paper size and all that, and the editor didn’t.
Nowadays even with technically non-WYSIWYG editors like markdown text you can still instantly preview the rendered output on screen, so there isn’t as much need to call it out as a feature.
There’s also WYGIWYW (“What You Get Is What You Want”) and is primarily used for latex, because you give up some manual control for a (allegedly) better looking result.