Word: acronym
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...Oxford American Dictionary, not surprisingly dubbed the OAD by its authors, lays down the law on color ("colour" does not appear in its listings) and 816-pages-worth of other words. Despite the similar acronym, the authors, four editors working in consultation with the Hudson Group in the Oxford University Press New York office, have not sought to write a comprehensive OED for the States. With more realistic goals in mind, they have instead entered the competitive--and lucrative--field of desk-top hardcover and paperback dictionaries. (The Avon paperback...
...Laboratory, in the foothills near Pasadena, who designed the spacecraft and control its mission. They fear that U.S. ambitions in interplanetary space may be rapidly dwindling, but the President announced the inclusion of $40 million in start-up funding in the fiscal 1982 budget for VOIR. That is an acronym for the Venus Orbiting Imaging Radar mission, a new project that had been eagerly sought by J.P.L., along with an unmanned probe to intercept Halley's comet when it returns in 1986. So far the U.S. has refused to authorize the tantalizing mission to the comet. Said J.P.L. Director...
...ABSCAM it turns out, is not short for "Arab scam," as widely reported. At the request of the American-Arab Relations Committee, Judge George C. Pratt, presiding at the trial, announced that the acronym actually stands for "Abdul scam," after Abdul Enterprises Ltd., the bogus import-export firm that the agents used as their front...
...addition to the strike leaders, Gierek was obviously referring to Poland's active dissident movement, spearheaded by the Committee for Social Self-Defense (known by the acronym KOR). Established after the 1976 riots to defend workers against official harassment, KOR has developed into the strongest dissident group in the Soviet bloc. Taking advantage of a relatively tolerant government attitude, it publishes several underground journals and is a sponsor of the underground "flying university" lecture series...
...latest acronym for an organization that was founded in 1917 as the Cheka and was successively known as GPU, OGPU, NKVD and MGB. A fief within the Soviet state, the KGB is an intelligence agency, counterintelligence organization and internal security police with its own uniformed military branch. Administratively it is divided into various "directorates" whose number and function are frequently scrambled, partly to confuse rival foreign intelligence services...