two clubs from Breda: NOAD: ( "Never give up, always persevere") ADVENDO: ( "Pleasant by entertainment and useful by relaxation") GIMP: "GNU image manipulation program" Recursive acronyms, in which the abbreviation refers to itself GNU: "GNU's not Unix!" Wine: "Wine is not an emulator" (originally, "Windows emulator") TLA: Three Lettered Acronyms These may go through multiple layers before the self-reference is found: HURD: "HIRD of Unix-replacing daemons," where "HIRD" stands for "HURD of interfaces representing depth" Pseudo-acronyms, which consist of a sequence of characters that, when pronounced as intended, invoke other, longer words with less typing This makes them gramograms. CQ: cee-cue for "seek you", a code used by radio operators IOU: i-o-u for "I owe you" K9: kay-nine for "canine," used to designate police units utilizing dogs Abbreviations whose last abbreviated word is often redundantly included anyway ATM machine: "automated teller machine" (machine) HIV virus: "human immunodeficiency virus" (virus) LCD display: "liquid-crystal display" (display) PIN number: "personal identification number" (number) Pronounced as a word, containing letters as a word in itself PAYGO: "pay-as-you-go" Historical and current use Acronymy, like retronymy, is a linguistic process that has existed throughout history but for which there was little to no naming, conscious attention, or systematic analysis until relatively recent times. Like retronymy, it became much more common in the 20th century than it had formerly been. Ancient examples of acronymy (before the term "acronym" was invented) include the following: Acronyms were used in Rome before the Christian era. For example, the official name for the Roman Empire, and the Republic before it, was abbreviated as SPQR (). Inscriptions dating from antiquity, both on stone and on coins, use many abbreviations and acronyms to save space and work. For example, Roman first names, of which there was only a small set, were almost always abbreviated. Common terms were abbreviated too, such as writing just "F" for , meaning "son", a very common part of memorial inscriptions mentioning people. Grammatical markers were abbreviated or left out entirely if they could be inferred from the rest of the text. So-called (sacred names) were used in many Greek biblical manuscripts. The common words "God" (), "Jesus" (), "Christ" (), and some others, would be abbreviated by their first and last letters, marked with an overline. This was just one of many kinds of conventional scribal abbreviation, used to reduce the time-consuming workload of the scribe and