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Comment by landhar | Hacker News Reader

Not sure if there’s a name for this, but my favourite example is settling on UTC as the acronym for Coordinated Universal Time:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time#E...

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ISO stands for the International Organization for Standardization, for largely the same reasons.

Maybe I got the wrong person (on the phone), but it was explained to me the name "ISO" was the Greek word for "sameness" and that Français and English just happened to form /meaningful/ representations for an acronym.

The Greek ισο "iso" does mean "equal". I do not know if that influenced the naming of the organization, though.

You see this word in many English roots, such as isotropic, isometric, isomer, etc.

"IT'S ALL IN THE NAME Because 'International Organization for Standardization' would have different acronyms in different languages (IOS in English, OIN in French for Organisation internationale de normalisation), our founders decided to give it the short form ISO. ISO is derived from the Greek isos, meaning equal. Whatever the country, whatever the language, we are always ISO." https://www.iso.org/about-us.html

But I'd tend to call BS - if it wasn't ever an acronym, why capitalize all three letters?

The google ngrams are also suggestive:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=international+...

In a similar vein, the acronym for Web Ontology Language is OWL[1].

[1]: https://www.w3.org/OWL/

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