(linguistics) The process of forming words or terms using initial letters of other words.
2015, James Lambert, “Lexicography as a teaching tool: A Hong Kong case study”, in Lan Li, Jamie McKeown, Liming Liu, editors,Dictionaries and corpora: Innovations in reference science. Proceedings of ASIALEX 2015 Hong Kong, Hong Kong: The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, page146:
The next most frequent source language was English, with neologistic compounds accounting for 15 etymologies, with 9 other English-based terms from a variety of word formation processes such asinitialism and semantic extension.
initialism on Wikipedia.Wikipedia