Hyla asks: Is the view of the wordies present that an acronym is itself a word?

Or at least something pronounceable. Some were abbreviations first and only later became words. Scuba is a good example as is radar, (RAdio Detection And Ranging) and laser. The OED supplement even recognizes the back-formed verb lase. In the area of local NYS government SEQR stands for State Environmental Quality Review and is pronounced [seeker]. The ones I like are acronyms in which the first word of the expansion is the same as the abbreviation. NEAR stands for Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous.