Acronym Trivia
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119 free Acronym trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
61 free acronym trivia questions with answers. Half the words you use every day started life as capital letters. This acronym trivia quiz asks what they actually stand for: NASA, scuba, laser, radar and sonar; UNICEF, UNESCO, OPEC and NATO; GIF, JPEG, PDF, HTML, URL, USB and GPS; ZIP codes, PINs, SIM cards and CAPTCHAs; and the brands, from IKEA, BMW and 3M to GEICO, Alcoa, Nabisco, Haribo and M&M's. It also separates fact from folklore: why Wi-Fi is not really 'wireless fidelity', what Hormel will and won't say about Spam, the Tom Swift novel behind the Taser, why SOS was chosen, and the backronyms people invent for Adidas, wiki, Yahoo and pan-pan. Internet shorthand gets a round too: LOL, YOLO, TL;DR and SNAFU. About a third of the questions are gimmes, a third need a good memory, and the rest will surprise most people. Every answer is checked against a cited source shown under the question.
30 of 119 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What does the 'A' in NASA stand for?
Aeronautics
National Aeronautics and Space Administration; it runs ten field centres from its Washington headquarters.
Q 02'Scuba' began as an acronym for what?
Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus
Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus was coined in 1952 by Christian Lambertsen, a US Army doctor who developed a diving rebreather; 'scuba' has since become an ordinary lowercase word.
Q 03The word 'laser' stands for light amplification by stimulated emission of what?
Radiation
Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation; Theodore Maiman built the first working laser, a ruby laser, at Hughes Research Laboratories in May 1960.
Q 04Which organisation coined the term RADAR in 1940?
The United States Navy
Radio detection and ranging; like scuba it has since become a plain lowercase noun.
Q 05What does the 'so' in 'sonar' stand for?
Sound
Sound navigation and ranging; passive sonar listens, active sonar pings.
Q 06UNICEF originally stood for the United Nations International Children's what?
Emergency Fund
Founded in December 1946 as the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund for post-war relief, it became the United Nations Children's Fund in 1953 but kept the UNICEF initials.
Q 07What does the 'S' in UNESCO stand for?
Scientific
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, founded in London in November 1945 and headquartered in Paris.
Q 08OPEC was founded in 1960 in which city?
Baghdad
OPEC was founded at the Baghdad Conference of 10–14 September 1960 by Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela; its headquarters moved from Geneva to Vienna in 1965.
Q 09GIF stands for Graphics Interchange what?
Format
CompuServe's Steve Wilhite released it in June 1987; he insisted it be pronounced with a soft g.
Q 10The letters JPEG come from the name of what?
A committee of experts
The Joint Photographic Experts Group; the format is a lossy compression method.
Q 11What does the 'R' in RAM stand for?
Random
RAM stands for random-access memory: any storage location can be read or written directly in roughly equal time, unlike tape, which must be wound to the spot.
Q 12What does the 'M' in HTML stand for?
Markup
Hypertext Markup Language defines the content and structure of web pages.
Q 13URL stands for Uniform Resource what?
Locator
Uniform Resource Locator, the web-address scheme devised by Tim Berners-Lee and formally specified in RFC 1738 in December 1994.
Q 14Who came up with the name Wi-Fi?
Q 21Why is the phrase 'PIN number' considered redundant?
The final letter already means that
Personal identification number; the N is 'number', so 'ATM machine' commits the same sin.
Q 22IKEA is an acronym built from Ingvar Kamprad's initials plus what?
His family farm and hometown
Elmtaryd and Agunnaryd; he founded the company at 17 in 1943 as a mail-order business.
Q 23The two Ms in M&M's stand for Forrest Mars and whom?
Bruce Murrie
Bruce Murrie, son of Hershey president William Murrie, took a 20% stake and secured the chocolate supply; the candy launched in 1941.
The brand consultancy Interbrand
The Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance hired the brand consultancy Interbrand in 1999, which offered ten names; Wi-Fi beat 'IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence', and 'wireless fidelity' was a later tagline.
Q 15CAPTCHA is a contrived acronym for a Completely Automated Public what?
Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart
Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, coined in 2003 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper and John Langford at Carnegie Mellon.
Q 16ZIP in 'ZIP Code' stands for what?
Zone Improvement Plan
Zone Improvement Plan; the US Post Office introduced five-digit ZIP Codes on 1 July 1963, with a name chosen to suggest mail zipping along faster.
Q 17The name Taser loosely honours which fictional boy inventor from a 1911 novel?
Tom Swift
Jack Cover named his 1974 stun gun after Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle (1911), inserting an A for 'Thomas A. Swift'; the boy-inventor series had begun in 1910.
Q 18CARE, of CARE Package fame, originally stood for the Cooperative for American Remittances to where?
Europe
Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe was formed in 1945 to ship food parcels to a war-torn continent; the first CARE Packages landed at Le Havre in May 1946.
Q 19SIM in SIM card stands for what?
Subscriber Identity Module
Subscriber Identity Module; the card holds the IMSI (international mobile subscriber identity) and a secret key that authenticate the phone on the network, a design introduced with GSM in 1991.
Q 20What does LED stand for?
Light-emitting diode
Light-emitting diode: a semiconductor junction in which electrons recombine with holes and release photons; Nick Holonyak built the first visible-light LED at General Electric in 1962.
Q 24What did 3M originally stand for?
Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing
Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company was founded at Two Harbors, Minnesota, in 1902 to mine corundum; the company made 3M its official name in 2002.
Q 25BMW began in 1916 as a maker of what?
Aircraft engines
BMW started out building aircraft engines — its 1917 IIIa powered the Fokker D.VII — and made no car until the 1928 Dixi; its first motorcycle, the R32, came in 1923.
Q 26GEICO stands for what?
Government Employees Insurance Company
Government Employees Insurance Company was founded in 1936 by Leo and Lillian Goodwin to insure federal workers and military officers; Berkshire Hathaway bought it outright in 1996.
Q 27What prize did Ken Daigneau win for naming Spam in Hormel's 1937 contest?
$100
Ken Daigneau, an actor and brother of a Hormel vice-president, won $100 for the name Spam in 1937; Hormel has said the name's meaning is known only to a few former executives.
Q 28The name Yahoo was later reinterpreted as an acronym for what?
Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle
Yang and Filo said Yahoo stood for 'Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle', an acronym invented after the fact for a site that began in 1994 as 'Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web'.
Q 29The name Lego comes from a Danish phrase meaning what?
Play well
Lego contracts the Danish 'leg godt', 'play well'; Ole Kirk Christiansen adopted the name in 1934, fifteen years before his first plastic bricks.
Q 30What does MASH stand for in M*A*S*H?
Mobile Army Surgical Hospital
Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, the US Army field units created in 1945 and made famous in Korea; Robert Altman's 1970 film and the 1972–83 TV series follow the fictional 4077th.