When writing here at Hmm, I use a few acronyms fairly regularly. I do try and explain their use the first time they are used in parenthesis to assist in reader comprehension, but in the more regular used cases like BTW (By The Way), I don’t. As a reader I know the annoying feeling when I come up against an acronym and don’t know what it means.

Fortunately, there is a search engine called, what else, abbrievationz (redirects to stands4.com), to quickly and easily find the answer to WTF these acronyms mean. Some acronyms have multiple meanings which adds to reader confusion. I had no idea that WTF had 61 definitions.

In the screenshot pictured at the top of this post you’ll see in red the advertising area in red and the search form above and contents below the fold which is one thing I do not care for about Abbreviationz. As of this writing they cover an impressive 411,330 Entries, 134 Categories and indicate having 311 editors. You can sign up to be an editor if you like, sort of DMOZ-like.

The Abbreviationz tools section provides one click search addition for Firefox, Google Toolbar and a right click context menu for Internet Explorer.

Friendly reader reminder: you can also add MakeYouGoHmm search to Firefox with one click by scrolling to the bottom of any Hmm search results page and clicking the “add search to FF” link near the copyright message. I dogfood this search regularly. Try it out. You can also subscribe to any Hmm search result keyword by RSS (just look for the orange XML button on each search results page). Useful for finding out if/when your site/service/product/blog is mentioned here.

Did this post make you go hmm?

 Loading ...

• Additional FUD acronyms
• Acronym Finder
• Search PHP manual via MakeYouGoHmm toolbar
• Tabbed browsing in IE via MSN Toolbar
• Make your site more Googlebot friendly
• How to add custom buttons to Google v4 toolbar