Recursive acronym

A recursive acronym is one that, unlike common acronyms, does not seem to fully explain its full meaning. It maintains the structure of common acronyms, in the sense that their names are born as a result of the particular abbreviation of a phrase, from which only the initials of some key words are selected. However, in a recursive acronym one of its letters represents the acronym itself. It is a frequent practice in the naming of open source software projects; due to its philosophy, it could simply be due to a play on words used capriciously by those who name their projects.^{[citation needed]} Like a brand, an acronym does not It is a word in itself, so its meaning depends on who uses it and in common agreement between the users; There are no rules that establish the criteria when creating an acronym, therefore there are no impediments for the creator of the acronym to decide to give it a meaning that makes it a "recursive acronym."

Examples of recursive acronyms

The best-known example of a recursive acronym is GNU, which stands for "GNU's Not Unix", 'GNU is not Unix'. As can be seen, the G is the recurring acronym, as it refers to the same acronym.

Other examples:

• Lame that means «Lame, Ain't an MP3 Encoder».
• XNA, Microsoft’s video game development tool, means «XNA (is) Not Acronimed».
• Wine means «Wine is not (an) emulator».
• PNG originally meant «PNG's Not GIF», although now it is "Portable Network Graphics".
• JOE, the online order editor, means «Joe's Own Editor».
• Pine, which means «Pine Is Not Elm» (both, Pine and Elm, are email clients in text mode for UNIX environments).
• Nagios, which means «Nagios Ain't Gonna Insist On Sainthood».

In some cases, a regular acronym has been changed to a recursive one. It is the case of:

• RPM, what happened to mean «RedHat Package Manager» a «RPM Package Manager».
• PHP, what happened to mean «Personal Home Page» a "PHP Hypertext Preprocessor".

A more complex case is that of Hurd, made up of a pair of mutually recursive acronyms:

• Hurd: «Hird of Unix-Replacing Daemons»“Hird” being the acronym of «Hurd of Interfaces Representing Depth».

There is also the case of unofficial recursive acronyms, as is the case of the Microsoft search engine, Bing, which popular belief says are the initials of "Bing Is Not Google».

Another unique case is that of UIRA which stands for "UIRA isn't (a) recursive acronym" (UIRA is not a recursive acronym), which is a false statement.