Capitalisation of "AKA"

[megyn...@gmail.com]

Hello everybody I was wondering what the rules are with "AKA", meaning "also known as".

I just did a Google News search of the abbreviation and noticed that most publications do not capitalise it. What is the reasoning behind this? I thought initialisms like this were supposed to contain all capitals?

Thanks.

[RH Draney]

On 9/23/2015 7:12 PM, Stefan Ram wrote:

> megyn...@gmail.com writes:
>> Hello everybody I was wondering what the rules are with
>> "AKA", meaning "also known as".
>

> It is an initialism, not an acronym, because it is spoken
> letter by letter.
>
> Initialisms that are not acronyms, even today, are usually
> written all-uppercase (according to one source).
>
> But according to the OED, this one appeared in 1948 IIRC and
> was written in lower-case already in 1948. All OED examples
> are lower-case, either »a.k.a.« or »aka«.
>
> Most dictionaries write it in lower-case, about 20 % of the
> dictionaries use upper-case for »aka«. In 22 dictionaries we
> have:
>
> 11 × a.k.a.
> 9 × aka
> 6 × AKA
> 1 × Aka
> 1 × A.K.A.
> --
> 28 (some dictionaries containe several of these ways to write it)

What may be at work here is that this abbreviation is made up of common
words that would not themselves be capitalized in such a context...the
same applies to such abbreviations as "asap" and the Latin "i.e." and
"e.g."...

The usual rule that applies to most acronyms/initialisms reflects the
fact that they often refer to the official names of organizations or
other concepts that would be capitalized if spelt [1] out in full....r

[1] Hi, other current thread!

[Peter Duncanson [BrE]]

To further make the point, replace that "..." with "etc".

>
>The usual rule that applies to most acronyms/initialisms reflects the
>fact that they often refer to the official names of organizations or
>other concepts that would be capitalized if spelt [1] out in full....r
>
>[1] Hi, other current thread!

--
Peter Duncanson, UK
(in alt.usage.english)

[Traddict]

"RH Draney" <dado...@cox.net> a écrit dans le message de groupe de
discussion : mtvn9...@news4.newsguy.com...

There seem to be exceptions: offhand, "QED" for "quod erat demonstrandum".

[Harrison Hill]

AFAIAA and IIRC there are many exceptions.

[RH Draney]

On 9/25/2015 2:37 AM, Harrison Hill wrote:
> On Thursday, 24 September 2015 15:51:23 UTC+1, Traddict wrote:
>> "RH Draney" <dado...@cox.net> a écrit dans le message de groupe de
>> discussion : mtvn9...@news4.newsguy.com...
>>>

>>> What may be at work here is that this abbreviation is made up of common
>>> words that would not themselves be capitalized in such a context...the
>>> same applies to such abbreviations as "asap" and the Latin "i.e." and
>>> "e.g."...
>>
>> There seem to be exceptions: offhand, "QED" for "quod erat demonstrandum".
>
> AFAIAA and IIRC there are many exceptions.

"Texting" abbreviations such as WTF and ROTFLMAO observe a different
tradition....r