Digital Acronyms

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Hello, I’m teacher Robin. Today we’re going to be talking about digital acronyms. So you may not know what an acronym is. This is actually a word that is made up of the first letter of other words. So this is a way to shorten what we are writing. So these are most often used in written English, especially text messages. In formal written English, when you send a message to a friend or a quick email. Normally, we don’t use them in more formal kinds of communications like business, but I’m going to give you some examples of ones that we use when we are chatting to friends, and ones that we can use in business and an email or something like that.

So let’s start with some informal ones. Okay, when we’re chatting with our friends, we can use acronyms like LOL, which means “laughing out loud”. So, if your friend or someone says something funny, you can say L-O-L or LOL, and that means that you are laughing at what they’re saying. Another message that we use in texting would be BRB or “be right back”. So let’s say you’re at the computer, or you have to leave for a few minutes, you can just send them a message that says BRB and that means “I’ll be back in five minutes” or “I’m coming back”. Another acronym that is very popular is OMG. So when something is very surprising, you can’t believe that you say OMG, which means “Oh My God!” or a nicer way to say that is “Oh My Gosh!”. So to express surprise, you say OMG. And another acronym that has become very popular recently is YOLO. Okay, so the YOLO stands for “You only live once”. So this is maybe encouraging someone to do something, take an opportunity, buy something, travel, etc. So if you want to, to do something special, you say YOLO, you only live once.

Some other acronyms that are a little bit more formal that we can use are IMO, which is “in my opinion”. TBH, “to be honest”. And BTW, “by the way”. So, if you want to remind someone of something, or you forgot to say something you can say BTW, by the way, I’m having a party tomorrow night. Speaking of parties, there are some acronyms that we can use related to getting together or celebrating with friends. One, if you’re having a party at your house, for example, you might use the acronym, BYOB, which means “bring your own beverage” or sometimes the B stands for beer, but really, it could be any kind of beverage. So if you’re having a party at your house, and you don’t want to buy all of the drinks, you can say to people “Hey, I’m having a party, BYOB”. So bring your own beverage. And then my favorite acronym is TGIF, which means “thank God” or “Thank goodness it’s Friday”. Okay, so many people say this to start the weekend after you’ve had maybe a long week at work. Oh, TGIF.

So now let’s look at some acronyms that we use in business. And in this case, it’s okay to write them to include them in a business email, for example, because they’re very commonly used in a business setting. The first one is FYI, which means “for your information”. You probably will see this in the title of an email. Quite often you’ll see FYI and ASAP is also used very often in a business setting, it means “as soon as possible”. So this is related to deadlines, things that someone needs. “Hey, could you send me that, could you turn in that project ASAP?”, as soon as possible. Some other business related acronyms are AKA, “also known as”. So this is when something is maybe called by another name, you can say AKA. Okay, when we use the VIP it’s a “very important person”. So you might be letting someone know oh, this person is coming to our office and they’re VIP, which means they’re a very important person. And my last business related acronym is TBD, which means “to be determined”. So this is often used when you are scheduling something and you don’t know the date or you don’t have all the information about something, you read this TBD, to be determined and that lets people know that you still haven’t decided about it yet, whether that’s a date, other information regarding a project or something like that. TBD. This is an important one.

Okay, so now that I have given you all of these digital acronyms, I want you to practice in the comments. So as I said, these are most often used in writing. So the best way to practice is by writing them. So you can even practice writing to each other, or write me a message using some of these acronyms, and I’ll be happy to read them in the comments. So I hope that this class has been useful for you. I hope you’ve learned something new. Maybe you knew a few of these already, but not all of them. But again, they’re very useful to kind of shorten your English especially if you want to send a quick message to someone. So thanks again for watching the class and I will see you again next week. Bye!