recursive acronym

n. A hackish (and especially MIT) tradition is to choose
acronyms/abbreviations that refer humorously to themselves or to other
acronyms/abbreviations. The original of the breed may have been TINT ( TINT
Is Not TECO ). The classic examples were two MIT editors called EINE ( EINE
Is Not EMACS ) and ZWEI ( ZWEI Was EINE Initially ). More recently, there is
a Scheme compiler called LIAR (Liar Imitates Apply Recursively), and GNU
(q.v., sense 1) stands for GNU's Not Unix! and a company with the name
Cygnus, which expands to Cygnus, Your GNU Support (though Cygnus people say
this is a backronym ). The GNU recursive acronym may have been patterned on
XINU, XINU Is Not Unix a particularly nice example because it is a mirror
image, a backronym, and a recursive acronym. See also mung , EMACS.

