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English
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In the linguistic sense (sense 1), FBI is a word; the ontology behind the informal sense (sense 2) holds that "no, FBI is an abbreviation, not a word."
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Etymology
From non- + word.
Noun
non-word (plural non-words)
- (linguistics) Any sequence of sounds or letters which is not considered to be a word, whether through an accidental gap (for example, phextapher-styphren) or through a systematic gap (for example, fssstpklyitnbkdv).
- Antonym: word
- Hyponym: pseudoword
This linguistics textbook, like many others, precedes nonwords with an asterisk; for example, *narbletome.
1986, Daniel G. Marowski, Contemporary Literary Criticism, page 382: trashola prose features regular dollops of sub-literate laziness (including non-words like "arousement" and "assertation").
- (informal) Any term that is not among the words of a language as those have often traditionally been defined by nonlinguists (for example, having syllables, and having come from centuries-old predecessor words): thus, an abbreviation, acronym, initialism, alphanumeric symbol, number written in digits (Arabic numerals 0 to 9), or logographic symbol.
- Antonym: word
- Hyponyms: symbol, logogram, logograph, abbreviation, acronym, initialism
In their glossary, they were using a convention where the words were in blue font and the abbreviations and other nonwords were in purple font.
1999, Arnošt Kotyk, “Introduction”, in Quantities, Symbols, Units, and Abbreviations in the Life Sciences: A Guide for Authors and Editors, Humana Press, →ISBN:All this was revealing and encouraged our work to proceed with a less lofty aim than initially, but with a more practical one, namely, to inform authors, reviewers, and especially desk or copyeditors about the recommendations in different areas of biology and to imbue these persons with the need for some rules and guidelines on the use of "nonwords" in science. Clearly, authors and editors are free to use symbols and abbreviations of their choice as long as they are defined and conform to basic rules of scientific nomenclature in their fields.
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