recursive acronym

A recursive acronym (or occasionally recursive initialism) is an abbreviation which refers to itself in the expression for which it stands. Due to the nature of the English language, which would infinitely recurse left-recursive phrases, recursive abbreviations are circular definitions.
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<convention> A hackish (and especially MIT) tradition is to choose acronyms and abbreviations that refer humorously to themselves or to other acronyms or abbreviations. The classic examples were two MIT editors called EINE ("EINE Is Not Emacs") and ZWEI ("ZWEI Was EINE Initially"). More recently, there is a Scheme compiler called LIAR (Liar Imitates Apply Recursively), and GNU stands for "GNU's Not Unix!" - and a company with the name CYGNUS, which expands to "Cygnus, Your GNU Support".
See also mung.
[Jargon File]
(1995-04-28)