NGO - Wordsmith.org

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I would be interested in learning how many of you recognize this acronym, and in particular whether there's a variance by geographic location. Thank you.

non-governmental organization?

that's my first thought.

I'm with ledasdottir, here.

Non-governmental organziation. It's used a lot in the news.

Me, too.

me, five.

Okay; thanks, you-all. But what I want to know is whether you've heard/seen the acronym, not whether you can guess what it stands for. 'Course, if you know what it stands for, then...

yes.

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Okay; thanks, you-all. But what I want to know is whether you've heard/seen the acronym, not whether you can guess what it stands for. 'Course, if you know what it stands for, then...

Definitely yes; we hear it plenty in the news and elsewhere.

But what I want to know is whether you've heard/seen the acronym

Ahem, I said: "It's used a lot in the news." Must be my Californy accent.

No question about it

Before reading the other posts, all I could come up with was humming hmm hmm N G O hmm hmm N G O... Now I find the song is about "business-oriented international non-governmental organizations". No wonder they gave the poor dog an acronym.

We ain't guessing. It's as common as FUBAR. Now if you want to guess, there's Nagoya, Japan - Komaki (Airport Code); Never Grow Old (Cranberries song); and National Gas Outlet for starters.

> It's as common as FUBAR.

Yeah, but that *is an acronym. NGO is just an abbreviation. Or do some say 'En-go'?

It's as common as FBI or CIA.

Right, it's just not acronymic.

Go / NoGo are descriptions of terrain in military jargon.

Go means you can travel the area.

NoGo means an area you cannot or should not travel in because terrain conditions make it unpassable (don't drive tanks through bog or fields of landmines) or because it is off-limits (don't fly over Iran on your way to Iraq).

Ahem, I said: "It's used a lot in the news." Must be my Californy accent. I did see your comment, thank you; but I was afraid that if I acknowledged it, everyone would think my question (which was NOT 'what does NGO stand for') had been answered, and the thread would then shut down.

Guess I've not been watching the right news shows. Thanks, all.

> Go / NoGo are descriptions of terrain in military jargon.

Ah, roger, FF. Now I get what zmjezhd was getting at.... I' m still unsure what exactly Jackie means with the acronym 'NGO' though.

NGO is as everyone said, "Non Governmental Organization."

This would include groups like WHO, the Red Cross, The Knights of Columbus - groups that give AID of some kind without direct backing of a government. Often the aid is direct - tsunami relief, e.g. Sometimes it's meant to help establish infrastructure - like schools or hospitals or election monitoring.

I'm not sure if there's any variaton in the interpretation of the term. I read it in the news and in reports internal to the company where I work. I only became aware of the abbreviation in the last year or two, but it's probably been around a lot longer and I only just became aware of it.

The acronym /not-acronym question is interesting. The way these things are used sometimes by the "in crowd" can be a little confusing to the spectator - at least to this spectator. It sounds a lot like "Engio." Some abbreviations just sort of naturally lend themselves to this kind of thing. They just sound like words.

> It sounds a lot like "Engio." Some abbreviations just sort of naturally lend themselves to this kind of thing. They just sound like words.

Oh, now I get the 'acronym' thing - it sounds like a word when you say the letters individually. Okay, far be it from me (but that's just not an acronym;-)

[running for cover]

Perhaps at some time in the not so distant past everyone in the known universe agreed that "acronym" referred only to collections of letters taken from the first letters of the individual words in a phrase, those letters forming a pronounceable word that was pronounced as that word, but those days are gone.

I had a friend in college named "Nguyen," pronounced nwin. Perhaps NGO should be pronounced propily as nwo, and engio is just a regional variation.

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Ahem, I said: "It's used a lot in the news." Must be my Californy accent. I did see your comment, thank you; but I was afraid that if I acknowledged it, everyone would think my question (which was NOT 'what does NGO stand for') had been answered, and the thread would then shut down.
Guess I've not been watching the right news shows. Thanks, all.

I've known the term since the early 1980s, but I was living in Brazil then when NGOs (or ONGs, as they were acronymized [yes!] in Portuguese) were (and still are, I guess) well-known and well-received.

> but those days are gone.

Does that mean we can invent a new word for its former meaning?

[shedding tears]

but those days are gone. - Does that mean we can invent a new word for its former meaning?

I think he means that the days when everyone agreed are gone. I agree

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Before reading the other posts, all I could come up with was humming hmm hmm N G O hmm hmm N G O... Now I find the song is about "business-oriented international non-governmental organizations". No wonder they gave the poor dog an acronym.

As usually happens, after saying I've never heard of it, I heard a BBC announcer use it while translating for a Czech woman on National Public Radio.
I decided to do a search on my local newspaper site (Dallas Morning News). I found 5 uses of NGO in the last month - 1 apropos, 1 about a Russian law relating to oil pipelines, 2 different Vietnamese names and one I couldn't actually find in the text - might have been in the name of an image file or something. In that same time period, there are 1,770 references to FBI and 709 references to CIA. (I didn't check them all to see if any were to the Culinary Institute of America.)

Thanks, Myr.

Faldage and all, I apologize for calling NGO an acronym; but what should I have put?

what should I have put?

I think that FBI, NGO, and the like are called initialisms.

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what should I have put?

I think that FBI, NGO, and the like are called initialisms.

Or either acronyms, depending in whether you've accepted the prevalent meaning shift in the term.

depending in whether you've accepted the prevalent meaning shift Ohhh, no no no--don't tell me that! IS NGO an acronym, or ISN'T it? I want to know; no gray area allowed.

Initialisms--thanks, zmjezhd.

> I want to know

descriptively yes; prescriptively no.

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depending in whether you've accepted the prevalent meaning shift Ohhh, no no no--don't tell me that! IS NGO an acronym, or ISN'T it? I want to know; no gray area allowed.

Initialisms--thanks, zmjezhd.

this graying of meaning is a work in process; e.g., MW-CD has initialism as an also meaning for acronym, while AHD4 still distinguishes between the two, although you have to look up both words to get the distinction. OED2 contrasts the two, but only if you look up initialism -- this is from the 1989 ed., they won't get to the As (or Is) in their updates for some time.

then there's Wiki:
"Initialism" originally referred to abbreviations formed from initials, without reference to pronunciation, but during the middle portion of the twentieth century, when acronyms and initialisms saw more use than ever before, the word "acronym" was coined for abbreviations which are pronounced as a word, like "NATO" or "AIDS". The term "initialism" is now typically taken to refer to abbreviations which are pronounced by sounding out the name of each constituent letter (e.g., HTML). However, in general usage, "acronym" is used by some speakers and writers to cover both forms, while others prefer to observe a difference. In addition, to many users, "initialisms" are also simply known as "abbreviations".

There is no agreement as to what to call abbreviations that contain single letters, but can otherwise be pronounced as a word, such as JPEG (jay-peg) or MS-DOS (em-ess-doss). These abbreviations are sometimes referred to as acronym-initialism hybrids, although they are grouped by most under the broad meaning of "acronym".

descriptively yes; prescriptively no.

I knew tsuwmone would find'em fightin' werds.