Abbreviation search

Type in the abbreviation in upper or lower case and press Enter or click the Find button. Abbreviations may contain a space or other characters (but only if that's the way they are written).

Do not put periods after letters in the abbreviation or search string (e.g., U.S.A, instead use USA) unless the abbreviation actually contains a period (like X.500). Don't use single or double quotes (' or ") around or in the abbreviation (they will be ignored).

Also, the following characters cannot be part of search string: @, #, $, %, ^, and ?

Watch out for plurals. For example, you might want to know what the abbreviation "pixels" means. Search for "pixel", not "pixels" (without the quotes, of course).

If the abbreviation you're searching for isn't found, be sure you are spelling it correctly. If you're searching for a word or phrase, see Word in Meaning and Search Within These Results below.

If you type in a single letter or even only two letters, you're likely to get a large results list. Use Search Within These Results to help narrow the results.

Word in Meaning search

You can search for words or concepts by using the word in meaning (reverse lookup) option then typing in a phrase or list of words. This will return a list of abbreviations containing the phrase or words you enter.

Searching for a word or string within the meaning of the abbreviation can help you find an abbreviation if you don't know what it is. For example, you could find all abbreviations containing (and thus probably having to do with) "education" or "technology" or "protocol".

Select the word in meaning option and then type in a word to search for. For example, if you type in "restrict" you'll get abbreviations containing "restrict". If you're looking for "restricted", you should use that search string.

To search for multiple words or concepts, type in each word separated by a space. This does a Boolean AND search for all the words you type in. So, if you typed in security system your search would return all abbreviations where both these words were found in the meaning (in any order). Do not use AND or OR with the keywords.

To find an exact phrase, put the phrase in quotes ("). To search for all abbreviations containing the exact phrase "security system", you would type in "security system" This would return abbreviations with meanings containing this exact phrase.

As with short abbreviations, searching for words frequently found in the meanings of abbreviations can generate very large lists. For example, the word "system" appears in over 25,000 definitions, generating an enormous (and almost useless) result list.

Search Within These Results

In the upper right of the table of results you'll see a link for "Search within these results". Searching within results can be done only if you know one of the words in the meaning. Type in that word (or a portion of the word), and press Enter or the Go button and your results will be based on the abbreviation you first typed in, but only abbreviations with meanings containing the word or word fragment you typed in.

Example: You search for CRM. You get 78 definitions but don't see what you're looking for. You happen to know that the "R" in CRM stands for "Risk". Instead of paging through all the results, looking for your definition, you click "Search within these results" then type in the word "risk" (without the quotes), and press Enter or the Go button. You'll then see only 6 results for CRM, all of which contain the word "Risk".

Search within Result Shortcut

We have also provided a convenient and direct shortcut for using "Search within result". When you type in CRM for a new search, type in CRM then a space, then a tilde (~), then the word you know is in the meaning, and you'll get the same result as above. So instead of searching for "CRM" (without the quotes) you'd do a search for "CRM ~risk" (without the quotes) and you would see only meanings for CRM with the word "risk" in them.

Rank

Rank is our measure of the relative "commonness", "popularity" or "relevance" of the meaning of an abbreviation. You'll see that the results are sorted by decreasing rank, which means the most commonly used meanings will be listed first. You can re-sort the list with an alphabetical sort if you like and you'll still be able to see each meaning's rank. Rank is available in normal abbreviation searches, and "word in meaning" (reverse lookup) searches.

Preferences

If you use the preferences page you can set several search options to be the default. Preferences you can set include:

• Default sort order (rank or alphabetical). If you prefer to show Acronym Finder search result sorted alphabetically instead of by rank/popularity, use this preference.
• Number of results per page. Use this preference to set the number of search results per page. The default is 20, but you can set it to as few as 5 results per page, or as many as 25 per page.
• Default category tab. This setting allows you to choose a different default category (filter) for your searches. For example, if you almost always search only abbreviations from Science and Medicine, you can use this preference to make that your default category tab/filter. If set another category tab, you can still switch to the show all tab.
• If only one result, use direct link page. Use this setting if you prefer to see a more streamlined result page when there is only one result for your search.

To use preferences, you must enable cookies in your browser.