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Comment by danellis | Hacker News Reader

When did ARM become Arm? It's like that on their own site, too.

2017: https://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/business/technology/arm-no-...

This part, though:

"ARM stands for Advanced RISC Machines, the name given to the company when it was spun out of Acorn Computers back in the day. It was abbreviated to ARM when the firm went public in 1998."

It was always abbreviated to ARM, ever since the 1980s. The whole reason for "Advanced RISC Machines" was to match the acronym they already had.

Right, but I think that 1998 is when it (officially/branding-wise) went from being an acronym with an expansion to being just three letters with no official 'long form'. (Compare the way IBM these days is just IBM, not International Business Machines.)

> Compare the way IBM these days is just IBM, not International Business Machines.

This is the second time I've seen someone make this claim online and I wonder where it comes from. IBM's name is still officially "International Business Machines Corporation (IBM Corp.)" according to this legal statement:

https://www.ibm.com/privacy/us/en/.

As for how it's referred to in practice, I've always heard it called IBM for as long as I can remember (at least back to the 70's) and I think that's been the case for much longer.

Oops, my mistake. I did try to check my belief on the IBM website by looking for an 'about the company' section but it was so reader-hostile I gave up and assumed that IBM was the name they were going by these days. Arm is definitely Arm, though, not anything-risc-machines.

Because the original was actually Acorn RISC Machines. They might have as well gone on to become "Acorn", well in line with Apple, which they power nowadays to a large degree, and which they might power to a much larger degree in the near future.

> They might have as well gone on to become "Acorn"

They were Acorn at that point. That's why the CPU was called Acorn RISC Machine (singular). There was never any company called "Acorn RISC Machines".

Good to know, thanks!

UK's grammar rules differ from the United States- they don't capitalize acronyms. i.e. NASA becomes Nasa.

From wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalization_in_English#Capi...):

>Generally acronyms and initialisms are capitalized, e.g., "NASA" or "SOS." Sometimes a minor word such as a preposition is not within the acronym, such as "WoW" for "World of Warcraft". In British English, only the initial letter of an acronym is capitalized if the acronym is read as a word, e.g., "Unesco."

Genuine question, do normal people pronounce ARM as "Arm" (like the limb) as in /ɑːrm/ or /ɑːm/, or do they pronounce it like A.R.M as in each letter individually.

I've always said ARM (as in each individual letter) when talking about ARM processors and it's never even occured to me to pronounce it like Arm.

That being said... I do pronounce RISCV as /rɪsk-viː/ (or, as I believe was the intention rɪsk-faiv depending who I am talking to) and that seemed entirely normal as opposed to pronouncing each letter in the Acronym...

So maybe I'm just weird here...

The company and CPU name has always been pronounced 'arm' like the body part.

In English, I usually just say it as the body part. In French, however, I would pronounce every letter separately.

My general rule is to pronounced any three letter Capitalised term as individual characters, so A/R/M and S/Q/L.

Since RISC-V is longer I pronounced it the same as you; /rɪsk-viː/, the same as to NASA and NATO.

Yeah, it's pronounced like the limb, and always has been, at least in English-speaking countries. Hence the StrongARM pun.

I can't say that I've ever noticed that to be generally true, but I'll certainly be looking out for it now.

The only time Brits capitalise the entire acronym is if we are worried about confusing Americans.

Which is always, is it not?

Almost never, actually.

I don't think it is /generally/ true - it's certainly in a bunch of style guides (e.g. The Guardian says Nato) but not in others (e.g. Plain English Campaign says NATO). I'd be amazed if there was an actual grammatical "rule" about this, mind.

Some additional bit of trivia: in Portuguese, you capitalize every letter for any acronyms of length <= 3 or those which you pronounce each letter separately like HTML. Having said that, for foreign names like NASA, you follow the original country's grammar rules so we'd never write Nasa

> UK's grammar rules differ from the United States- they don't capitalize acronyms.

They don't call themselves the Uk, do they?

That's because UK isn't pronounced as a word, it's pronounced as an acronym - yoo kay, so both letters are capitalised. If it was pronounced as a word - yuck perhaps - only the first letter would be capitalises.

An acronym is pronounced as a word. You mean initialism.

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