Origin: 1943
As wartime production of names using initials reached an all-time high, it was high time to give a name to the growing arsenal of alphabetic abbreviations. That need was met in a note in the February 1943 issue of American Notes and Queries: "Your correspondent who asks about words made up of the initial letters or syllables of other words may be interested in knowing that I have seen such words called by the name acronym, which is useful, and clear to anyone who knows a little Greek."
Greek? Yes, acronym follows the model of other designations for types of words, like synonym, antonym, and homonym. The -nym means "a kind of word"; acro- means "top, peak, or initial," as in acrobat or acrophobia. Sometimes scholars distinguish between initialisms, which are simply a series of letters pronounced one after the other, like USA (1795 as "United States of America," 1848 as "U.S.
Army"), GOP (Grand Old Party, 1883), IQ (1916), and GI (1917), and hard-core acronyms, which are initials pronounced as a separate word, like WAC (a member of the Women's Army Corps, 1943), Snafu (1944), and radar (radio detection and ranging, 1941). In general use, however, these are all called acronyms.
And what were the acronyms so busily produced during World War II? Initialisms ranged from PX (post exchange, 1941) to V.D. (venereal disease, 1942) and included the names of numerous agencies such as OPA (Office of Price Administration), OSS (Office of Strategic Services, predecessor of the present CIA or Central Intelligence Agency), and WPB (War Production Board). Acronyms pronounced as words included CARE (Cooperative for American Relief in Europe, 1945) at war's end, and after the war NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization, 1949). Soon after the establishment of the U.N. (United Nations fighting the Axis, 1942) a plethora of acronyms, some of the quite long, blossomed. Two of the longer ones are UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, 1945) and UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, 1943).