Notes on Shortened forms

Should it be “an RSS feed” or “a RSS feed”? “An HTML document” or “a HTML document”? “CSS is” or “CSS are”? These, and other little abbreviation issues, I wanted to follow up, and here are the results…

An or A with initialisms and acronyms

Going on the information in my dearly beloved Style Manual, even though we say “a Really Simple Syndication feed”, once “Really Simple Syndication” has been abbreviated as the initialism RSS, we should say “an RSS feed”, because RSS is pronounced “ar-ess-ess” (which starts with a vowel, and “an” is used before vowels for ease of pronunciation). This implies that when an initialism is used, is should be spoken as letters, rather than as the words it abbreviates; and this makes perfect sense, as the whole point of an initialism—apart from conserving space—is to save time and effort.

Plural initialisms

An initialism like FAQ can be pluralized with an s (FAQs—no apostrophe needed). But how should we handle initialisms that are inherently plural to begin with? For example, “US” represents the Unites States, which is plural. So should it be “the US is” or “the US are”?

I didn’t find a definitive answer on this, perhaps because the answer is too obvious to bother spelling out. “US” is used as a name in itself—a collective name of all the individual States, used to represent a country—so it makes sense to say “the US is…” Likewise, “CSS” refers to Cascading Style Sheets, but it is a name that collectively represents these style sheets, so we say “CSS is…”