From Merriam Webster:

a word (such as NATO, radar, or laser) formed from the initial letter or letters of each of the successive parts or major parts of a compound term

also : an abbreviation (such as FBI) formed from initial letters : initialism

It appears the meaning of the word has changed over time.

There's literally an acronym for that type of acronym that itself is not an acronym: TLA. Three-letter acronym. I get the GP's frustration. When a word that you know the definition of is lost it feels bad.

The hardest for me to accept is the loss of alternate. It now means the same thing as alternative, but it used to refer to switching between possible states, usually in an oscillating manner. Nowadays I alternate between caring and not caring.

At least alternate and alternate have different pronunciations.

yeah, every time i see somebody call an initialism an acronym i just shrug because you can't argue with words how people use them, irregardless.

If you like this, definitely check out WordNet (https://wordnet.princeton.edu/)

And Open English WordNet (https://en-word.net/) which builds on WordNet 3.0 and 3.1, improving the core data both with new words and with fixes to the hierarchy.

> And Open English WordNet (https://en-word.net/) which builds on WordNet 3.0 and 3.1, improving the core data both with new words and with fixes to the hierarchy.

This looks dope!

Do you recommend some other viewer type software to use on OS X or is everything self contained in the zip file?

The zip files contain the complete data in various formats.

For the WNDB (WordNet DataBase) format, you could use the WordNet viewer or any WordNet compatible software. This will not be able to view all the Open English WordNet data, as it has parts of speech and relationship types not in the original WordNet.

For the RDF/Turtle (Resource Description Framework) format, you could use any RDF visualization tool. I don't have any specific recommendations.

For the LMF/XML (Lexical Markup Framework XML) format, you would need an XSLT stylesheet to convert the data to something else like HTML.

You could also run https://github.com/jmccrae/wordnet-angular locally, which is the project used to run the https://en-word.net website. That takes the LMF/XML data, creates a SQLite database for it, and runs a web server on that database.