Hacker News Reader

One floating point operation per second

One flops

Two giga- floating point operations per second

Two gigaflops

Acronyms get pluralized separately from their contents, though. You wouldn't say "two CPU" or "two SSD" or "two taser."

But you would add an 's' to both of your examples to make two central processing units (CPUs) and two solid state drives (SSDs). I agree, it's a weird rule but it certainly sounds better.

When the pluralization happens in the middle of the acronym it becomes weird -- one FLOPS, two FLOPsS?

Both of my three examples?

Anyway, you're right, they would all get an S at the end either way.

A better example would be "captcha." You'd say "two captchas," not "two captcha" or "two captscha."

For a less polite example that works the same way, consider MILF.

So ...

Two gigaflosps?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com