Acronym never expanded
undefined-acronymon by default (info)Japanese / English
An acronym such as "KGI" or "PMF" used without ever being spelled out
Example
How to fix
Expand it in brackets at first use. If your readers know it as a name (a company, say), list it under names in chaff.yaml and it is not asked for.
Why it matters
An acronym means different things to different readers. What is obvious inside one team is not obvious outside it.
What it does not flag
Common acronyms (URL, PDF), acronyms spelled out in brackets next to them, and the letters of a company name (㈱ADEKA, CO.,LTD.) are not reported. Neither are a template's placeholders (OOOO, XX 月) or an acronym in the title of a page in a list of links (it still counts towards the limit). Nor are an acronym explained under another capitalisation (TCoP, then TCOP), one a sentence about the abbreviation writes out (the abbreviation DOB … date of birth), or a term in a list whose nested link names it (- GPL above GNU General Public License). Nor are the parties and courts of a case citation (Ashwander v. TVA, 297 U.S. 288; MCI Telecomms. Corp. v. AT&T; (SDNY 1952)), an agency's docket number in a citation (NOV/CFA 01-01); a citation's acronyms still count towards the limit. Nor is the MR. JUSTICE that opens a line of an opinion. An acronym given another name after "or" in its parenthesis (Department of Health and Human Services (HHS or the Department)) or spelled out with its hyphened letter (Agency for Health (ARPA-H)) counts as expanded, and the letters of an email address (OASH-RFI@hhs.gov) are not an acronym. Nor are the rule names and values of an ABNF grammar in the text (CRLF, %x0D), the rungs of a grade ladder (A and AA), a register or reporter cited by number (80 FR 66128, 2022 WL 4447293), the kind written before a dated identifier (WD WD-ABC1-20200101), or the PO of a PO Box. A note that opens with a citation (1. See L. Summers (2015), "…," IMF Economic Review) is written in the cited work's words, and its acronyms are not reported (they still count towards the limit).
Turning it off or relaxing it
Technical details
- Layer
- L1
- Status
- stable
- Severity
- info
- Languages
- Japanese and English
- Suited to
- business, technical, legal, docs, academic, literature, speech
Levels
Set a level for this rule under rules in chaff.yaml. With nothing set, it runs at the level its genre gives it (see By genre below).
| strict | reported once 1 different acronyms go unexplained, or from the first one when the document itself spells out 1 others |
|---|---|
| normal | reported once 3 different acronyms go unexplained, or from the first one when the document itself spells out 3 others |
| relaxed | reported once 6 different acronyms go unexplained, or from the first one when the document itself spells out 6 others |
These genres set their own numbers for the levels (npx chaffjs explain shows them): technical
By genre
- Runs by default in
- technical/spec, technical/readme, business/proposal, business/report, business/email, business/press-release, business/meeting-notes, legal/contract, legal/statute, legal/judgment, legal/patent, docs/manual, docs/faq, docs/glossary, speech/address
- Turned off by the genre in
- academic/paper, literature/fiction, literature/essay, literature/poetry, literature/play, speech/transcript
- Not suited to, and not run in
- blog/tech, blog/essay, blog/owned-media
Message
"{word}" is used without an expansion ({count} such acronyms)
Sources
This page is built from the rule's definition file:packages/chaff/rules/undefined-acronym.yaml