initialism

1. (linguistics) A term formed from the initial letters of several words or parts of words, which is itself pronounced letter by letter.Examples: "The BBC is an initialism for the British Broadcasting Corporation."Synonyms: alphabetism

2. (linguistics) The process of forming words or terms using initial letters of other words.Examples: "The next most frequent source language was English, with neologistic compounds accounting for 15 etymologies, with 9 other English-based terms from a variety of word formation processes such as initialism and semantic extension."