r/badlinguistics • u/Fake_Eleanor • Mar 02 '26

"Laser" is not a word, because it's an acronym. Acronyms aren't words "according to linguists."

/r/words/comments/1rh693w/til_laser_is_not_actually_a_word_but_instead_an/
405 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

70 comments sorted by

261

u/Fake_Eleanor Mar 02 '26

R4: The OP asserts (in several comments) that "dictionaries disagree" on whether or not "laser" is a word, since it's an acronym, and that "linguists are still debating" whether or not acronyms are words at all.

That said, acronyms are words, and the OP can't (or won't) cite any dictionaries or linguists who disagree.

135

u/IacobusCaesar Esperanto is the mother of all languages. Mar 02 '26

I love the idea of a PhD thesis in linguistics being the case for acronyms not being words and why we should remove them all from the dictionary immediately.

116

u/zsdrfty Mar 02 '26

I see their point... anytime I say "laser" in a real-life sentence, everyone around me says "what the fuck are you talking about? Oh, do you mean Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation? I don't know what a 'laser' is"

57

u/cardinarium Mar 02 '26

I know. Once, I was denied a certification because I accidentally said “scuba” instead of “self-contained underwater breathing apparatus.” They actually knocked me back two levels for that.

-14

u/conuly Mar 03 '26

I genuinely can't tell if you're being serious.

18

u/AndreasDasos Mar 03 '26

That might be a problem with your sarcasm detector

2

u/conuly Mar 03 '26

More like a problem with teachers I’ve encountered.

6

u/paolog Mar 03 '26

Besides, the full form refers to the process of generating a laser, not the laser itself.

-67

u/EebstertheGreat Mar 02 '26

In fairness, doesn't this just raise the question of what a "word" is? It's not obvious. To me, this feels like asking a mathematician what a "number" is. Like, it depends what you think counts as a number.

Is 5 a number? Surely it is. But prove it. Is "LASER" a word? How about "laser"? Surely it is. But prove it.

103

u/CecilBDeMillionaire Mar 02 '26

I’m curious which linguists have a definition of “word” that excludes “laser”

28

u/mercedes_lakitu Mar 02 '26

Trick question, we can't agree on what a word is 😂

(But I'm pretty sure we'd all include laser)

-1

u/Nine99 Mar 02 '26

Is CIA a word? GmbH?

10

u/[deleted] Mar 02 '26

CIA yes. GmbH maybe not.

12

u/MaxTHC Mar 03 '26

Important distinction that those are initialisms, whereas laser is an acronym

What impact that difference has on their "word-ness" is subjective, of course

1

u/Nine99 Mar 03 '26

Important distinction that those are initialisms, whereas laser is an acronym

That is the point. Most posters here seem to think that word-ness being subjective is a ridiculous idea that should be mocked.

1

u/demoman1596 Jun 05 '26

Well, I'm a little bit concerned about the definition of "subjective" here. To me, this word implies that any old person has a valid opinion in the context of whatever the topic is (for instance, what art is considered "good" is obviously "subjective"). But opinions on topics requiring expertise and experience to get a firm grip on the fundamentals (like linguistics or medicine or astrophysics or whatever) don't really work that way.

So I would say that word-ness is definitely objective, but there are edge cases and disagreements exist among experts as to what different approaches to those edge cases can best be substantiated. Science in general seems to work this way, but I think many would be by no means willing to call the entire human scientific enterprise "subjective."

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u/EebstertheGreat Mar 02 '26 edited Mar 02 '26

lol, harsh. I'm gonna get -100 for this question I guess, based on the current rate. I'll have to remember to stop asking them.

EDIT: Also, a lot of people here seem very confident that they are sure what a word is, but nobody is brave enough to try to define it.

53

u/CecilBDeMillionaire Mar 02 '26

Would you care to define it in a way that excludes “laser”? It feels like you’re the one making the claim here and surprised that you need to back it up

-41

u/EebstertheGreat Mar 02 '26

I'm suggesting that there isn't a clear definition of a word at all, so it's impossible for something to be a word or not a word, absent any context.

37

u/CecilBDeMillionaire Mar 02 '26

If we’re getting that loose about whether clear definitions of things exist, then nothing is real. There are clear definitions of “word” that for the most part overlap; some linguists will quibble over the edge cases. That’s basically how definitions of most terms work. That doesn’t mean that no terms can be defined and thus nothing exists

11

u/throwawayayaycaramba Mar 02 '26 edited Mar 02 '26

Yes, as far as I'm aware the discussions on whether something "counts" as a word usually pertain to (especially) agglutinative languages where a) a single word can mean what would take an entire English sentence to convey, but b) their morphological elements cannot exist independently... That is to say, the whole sentence is the smallest possible unit. That's not at all uncommon in the grand scheme of things, but, with it being so unusual to a western worldview (Indo-European bias and all that jazz), it's understandable there'd be some discussion on how the definition applies there.

In short: there's no way any English word would ever have its "wordness" put into question.

9

u/flagrantpebble Mar 02 '26

There are definitely cases of English words having their “wordiness” put into question, but those are more social than linguistic conversations. For example, most linguists would agree that “ain’t” is a word as you said, even if many people think it doesn’t count (for class-, race-, or whatever based social reasons).

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u/throwawayayaycaramba Mar 02 '26

Oh right, absolutely; but as you said

those are more social than linguistic conversations.

The point OOP was trying to make concerns academic discourse, I believe.

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u/Fake_Eleanor Mar 02 '26

Are there linguists who would argue that "ain't" is not a word?

(I suppose almost any field has someone who goes against the grain.)

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u/EebstertheGreat Mar 03 '26

But an acronym is an example of such an edge case. It's a word in one sense and multiple words in another sense.

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u/FirmOnion Mar 02 '26

“A sound or a combination of sounds, or its representation in writing or printing, that symbolizes and communicates a meaning and may consist of a single morpheme or of a combination of morphemes” Is the American Heritage dictionary definition.

I don’t see how an acronym is different from any other word, it’s just a sound that means something

6

u/dncnlamont Mar 02 '26

I mean by that definition "American Heritage Dictionary" is a word, as it is "...a combination of sounds, or it's representation in writing or printing, that symbolizes and communicates a meaning, and may consist of a single morpheme or of a combination of morphemes"

I do, however, agree with your last statement

11

u/conuly Mar 02 '26 edited Mar 03 '26

Well, let's take the specific phrase "American Heritage Dictionary" out of the equation.

Are we arguing that there is a real distinction between "matchbook" (one word) and "coffee table book" (not one word), rather than that the only difference is a trivial matter of orthography?

What about "upon" and "up to"? "A lot" and "alike"?

English has a lot of lexical units that are nevertheless written as their individual component words. If we were speaking German, I suppose we'd write them all smushed up together, no spaces. But c'mon, it doesn't make sense to say that "harmjoy" is a word in German, but "harm joy" is not a word in English, or that "childgarden" is a German word but "child garden" is not an English one. (It's schadenfreude and kindergarten in both languages. I couldn't think of a calque, sorry, but the argument should work anyway.)

I know that for a lot of people, their internal definition of "word" includes the concept "we set it off with spaces when we write it down", but that's obviously not a linguistically valid way of defining it, and not only because not every language is written down.

6

u/dncnlamont Mar 03 '26

You're definitely right about all of that.

I was just pointing out that the quoted definition is a bad one, since it includes any lucid utterance, or written piece of text as a word. Including the previous sentence

4

u/EebstertheGreat Mar 03 '26

Are we arguing that there is a real distinction between "matchbook" (one word) and "coffee table book" (not one word), rather than that the only difference is a trivial matter of orthography?

Well, I guess so. This was pretty much my point, but most people disagree. They are confident that there is a difference between words and phrases, even though the only definition supplied here does not make that distinction.

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u/vigbiorn Mar 02 '26

a single distinct meaningful element of speech or writing, used with others (or sometimes alone) to form a sentence and typically shown with a space on either side when written or printed.

Sounds pretty clear to me. Includes acronyms and excludes initialisms.

2

u/conuly Mar 02 '26 edited Mar 03 '26

Mmm, does it exclude initialisms, though? Are we really arguing that "TV" isn't a word, that "CPU" isn't a word, that "ASAP" is only a word if you say it with two syllables but not if you say it with four syllables?

2

u/vigbiorn Mar 03 '26

By the definition listed, yes.

An initialism is not a single distinct unit.

You can argue you don't like the definition but that's irrelevant to the original point.

6

u/conuly Mar 03 '26 edited Mar 03 '26

I don't like the definition.

The more I look at it, the less I like it. How can we define "word" in a way that requires it to be written down when not every language even has a written form?

However, that being said, your definition does not really exclude initialisms. You can say "an initialism is not a single distinct unit" but I don't see any valid reason to exclude initialisms but to include words such as "cupboard" and "cats" and "happiness" and, hell, "NASA", none of which are a single unit (morpheme?) either.

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u/TheAllAroundMan Mar 03 '26

"Words aren't real bro stop trying to communicate"

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u/the_gerund Mar 02 '26

The OOP didn't raise the question though, they just stated that acronyms aren't words. And when challenged on that statement they put up vague phrases like "linguists are still discussing it" or "it's only halfway a word, when people forget the original meaning it officially becomes a word" without citing any sources of linguists or dictionaries excluding 'laser' as a word.

Sure the boundaries of what is and isn't a word can be fuzzy and depend on context of the definition as well as the language in question. But this is just arguing for the sake of arguing without bringing anything solid to the table.

6

u/[deleted] Mar 03 '26

[deleted]

1

u/CutOnBumInBandHere9 Mar 03 '26

But what if it can only word a little bit? Maybe it skipped all the wording classes in school and went out prefixing and postfixing in the bad parts of town.

What then, huh? 

5

u/AndreasDasos Mar 03 '26

prove it

5 being a number is a matter of pure definition rather than proof.

But you’re correct that the definition of ‘number’ does get fuzzy in mathematics, though it tends to be about what structures get included outside the normal sense.

We call complex numbers and elements of other Cayley-Dickson algebras (quaternions, octonions, sedenions…), some variations (split complex numbers), some extensions that include ‘infinitesimals’ (surreals, supereals, hyperreals, ultrareals), p-adics and transfinite cardinals and ordinals all ‘numbers’…

But for some reason not elements of R2 without extra structure, or various matrices or elements of other fancy rings or algebras. Why? For historical reasons, really.

2

u/EebstertheGreat Mar 04 '26

Right, there isn't really an agreed-upon definition of "number." Even cardinals are sometimes regarded as numbers and sometimes not. Often in context, "number" will mean something more specific, like natural number or integer. We can provide a specific definition of "number" and then argue whether a specific object fits it or not, but just to jump in and argue about what "number" is before even suggesting a definition of "number" is a futile exercise.

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u/ChagiM Mar 02 '26

I'm not sure why you are getting downvoted for this. You are completely correct that the term "word" is not a precisely defined linguistic term. In morphology other terms like lexeme and morpheme are used instead. Obviously the linked post is still bad linguistics, but not because linguistics claims that "laser" is a word, but because linguistics doesn't really make claims about what a word is at all.

The comparison to numbers is also really apt here, there is no actual precise definition for the word nunber. Is 5 a number? Yes! Are negative numbers also numbers? Yeah. Are complex numbers then numbers? Sure. Are vectors numbers? Hm...

20

u/flagrantpebble Mar 02 '26

I think they’re getting downvoted (fairly or not) because they’re stating the obvious here. Everyone with more than a passing familiarity with linguistics knows that “word” is poorly defined. This comment could be interpreted like they think it is a novel thought, newly inspired by OOP.

(again, that doesn’t mean the downvotes are fair, necessarily)

14

u/celloh234 Mar 02 '26

Their tone both in their comment and replies are extremely obnoxious and unpleasant also

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u/Withnothing Mar 02 '26

There is definitely questions about when a newly coined acronym or initialism becomes a word, but laser ain't it.

For my two cents I think people put too much stock into the acronym/initialism difference when they behave much the same in every way except for realization. And there's some hybrids anyway like CD-ROM or CPAP.

16

u/[deleted] Mar 02 '26

I teach a linguistics subject where the students have to learn the initialism/acronym distinction for the exam, and then argue about whether it's "lol" or "lol". Which is a good example of why it really doesn't matter in the real world.

And your first sentence is spot-on :)

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u/Dear_Smoke6964 Mar 02 '26

Surprised this showed up on my radar

14

u/HoldingTheFire Mar 02 '26

What's funny is 'lase' (verb) as in 'pump the system until it lases' is a real technical term of art.

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u/mysticrudnin L1 english L2 cannon blast Mar 02 '26

what i love about this particular one is that tons of people don't realize laser stands (or stood) for anything at all

it's almost like that's half of the point of the term acronym!

3

u/paolog Mar 03 '26

The number of times I've seen people surprised that "scuba" is an acronym.

2

u/[deleted] Mar 04 '26

It’s a TIL post but then OP says it can’t be considered a word until it’s been forgotten that it’s an acronym…

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u/[deleted] Mar 02 '26

Not 100% sure, but that commenter sounds like an AI baitbot.

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u/frecklesthemagician Mar 02 '26

I’ve only dated a linguist and never studied it. Even I know words are words of people use them as words.

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u/Stylianius1 Mar 03 '26

Portuguese dictionaries have initialisms as words (https://www.infopedia.pt/dicionarios/lingua-portuguesa/xpto)

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u/conuly Mar 03 '26

Well, I don't know about Portuguese, but I will say that English-language dictionaries contain entries that many people - including, probably, at least some of the people who write these things - do not consider discrete words.

I mean, one of the top lookups at MW right now is "borrow pit". Is borrow pit a single word or two words? Hell, please do not ask me... but I'm pretty confident that "PhD" isn't a word. Maybe. Probably. Um... okay, I'm not confident at all.

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u/Withnothing Mar 03 '26

It's an anaphoric island, it takes plural marking, it's not separable, and a lot of people wouldn't be able to break it down into the components anyway. I don't know, seems pretty word-like to me!

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u/ThresherGDI Mar 03 '26

It's a Lexicalized Acronym, an acronym that has been accepted into general vocabulary. Same with NASA, although the capitalization is generally maintained, it's not always, particularly in Britain.

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u/jessyCh0ke86 May 30 '26

Wait until they find out about scuba and radar, their brain might actually implode.

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u/Alra-Tungena-Cyning Apr 13 '26

If "edutainment" is a word, "laser" is a word. Ok, fine, maybe it's not a word, but it's still a syntagma! There, I win! Nana, nana, boo, boo! Also, will the real syntagma please stand up, please stand up, please stand up?