Acronyms have their uses, but even the most dedicated of jargonauts can agree that littering your conversations with them is hardly helpful. Still, over time a significant reservoir of general business acronyms have been added to office lexicons and it can be handy to familiarise yourself with them.
Image: Susanne Nilsson / Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons 2.0
The Muse’s Kat Moon has compiled a list of the more common acronyms and even abbreviated, there’s still over 120 of them. Moon outlines a number of major areas — general, finance, technical, marketing and job titles — which should cover you most of the time.
Some are universally recognised:
COB: Close of business
ETA: Estimated time of arrival
OOO: Out of office
Others a little less so:
FWIW: For what it’s worth
IMO: In my opinion
KISS: Keep it simple stupid
And a few that I personally have never heard or seen before:
WIIFM: What’s in it for me
TED: Tell me, explain to me, describe to me
Hit up The Muse article for the full list.
Your Ultimate Cheat Sheet to Deciphering the 123 Most Common Business Acronyms [The Muse]
Comments
2 responses to “Know Your Business Acronyms”
I regularly used WOFTAM during project management activities. Polite version – WOFTAM – Waste of Flaming Time And Money.
My company has a two sided A4 page of acronyms that are JUST for our company (handily PDFed on our internal site for new starters!).
I’ve been here a year and a half and still hear new ones…