Tim Gaudette (iamtjg)

Acronyms Suck

Frustrated by acronyms and jargon all over documentation? Can't kick the habit of using them yourself? Well I certainly am. I constantly run into situations where the confusion and extra cognitive load caused by the use of acronyms far outweighs any of the positive effects it could have.

So, I'm doing something about it. I started on a script you can include on a page that will find all possible acronyms (possible being any words with 2 or more capital letters) and see if they are defined in a provided list of known acronyms and definitions. It then inserts a widget on the screen that can be expanded to list all the acronyms on the page and their definitions.

The default color of the widget is purple representing mystery. Once expanded, it turns blue representing truth.

Ultimately, I plan/want/hopefully get around to making a service that this client script can send acronyms to and receive definitions back to give the option of not doing the matching client-side. People would also be able to manage and define acronyms in that service.

Source: https://github.com/iamtjg/acronym-identifier