Please read these before submitting apronyms. Keep in mind that they are only guidelines and can be flexible, so if you're not sure whether your apronym is suitable, send it in anyway. Please don't be offended if your apronym is not accepted into the stack/website for reasons mentioned in these guidelines.
Apronyms, not just acronyms. Try to keep your expansion on the same topic as the acronym, or at least with some vague connection given the circumstances of the acronym's creation. Though several off-topic acronyms have been included in the past, from now on acronyms which are not related in some way to their expansions may be rejected.
Apronyms with particularly offensive content, especially swear-words, may be rejected.
If your apronym is on an obscure topic, please include some explanation. We like to encourage learning and some active research through apronyms, so if the apronym can be understood through looking up a word in a dictionary or other common reference book then an explanation is not required. Otherwise it's best to include a short explanation of the topic, which, if not explaining everything needed to understand the apronym, is at least sufficient to aid the reader in finding out more about the subject. A good example of this is Tony's Shakespeare characters - while the explanations don't explain the plot of the story and the character's position in it, the name of the play is enough for people to find out such information if they wish.
Similarly, if your apronym refers to a historical or current event, please include a sentence or two explaining what it refers to. A historic event might not be known to people who weren't alive at the time. Even apronyms whose subject is obvious now due to some recent event might perplex people in a few years' time.
There is very little skill in making lists of words with specific initials, all you need is an encyclopaedia. For that reason it is preferred that apronyms form sentences rather than lists. Listing a few things is okay within a sentence, but not if it makes up the bulk of the expansion.
Please use PUNCTUATION in your apronyms if necessary. Some apronyms are very difficult to make sense of without punctuation, and although I try to insert correct punctuation when adding them to the website, sometimes it's difficult to figure out how the apronym best makes sense. Your apronym with my punctuation could convey a different message from the one you intended.
If you send in an apronym, remember that you might not be able to withdraw it at a later date. Although apronyms can be removed from the website and the next version of the HyperCard stack, once the stack has been released with an apronym in it the acronym will remain accessible to people who have that version of the stack. When you send in an apronym with your name in the credit, be sure you will still want to be associated with it at a later date!
Please do not send in apronyms which you didn't think of yourself, unless you credit the original apronymist and preferably get the acronymist's permission to publish their apronym.
Don't send lists of apronyms which you've found somewhere else on the internet - I know there are some out there but I'd prefer it if the APRONYMS stack were preserved for the people who want to be in it. Otherwise I could spend hours scouring the internet for apronyms and the site would become more about compilation than composition. A few common apronyms of this nature have already been included, back when the collection was smaller - but no more will be accepted. You can post acronyms of unknown origin on the 'Acronymous Anonymous' thread of the forums, here.
APRONYMS is for original apronyms only - usually expansions of words, or alternate expansions for commonly known acronyms. Explanations of commonly used or technical acronyms are not what this stack/website is about - other sites like Acronym finder deal with these.
If you have a suggestion for improving an existing acronym by changing a word or two, ask the original acronymist(s) (either by posting in the forums or asking me to forward an email) whether they prefer your version of the apronym. If your version is preferred then it could replace the original apronym, with the credit shared between everyone who contributed to it. If there is no agreement on which expansion is better and there is only one word different, then your suggested word might be added to the existing apronym, separated from the original word by a slash. You and the original apronymist will then share the credit for the acronym. If the apronyms are more than one word different, then your apronym will be added separately, perhaps with a mention in the credit that it is a modification of another acronym (like in STATISTICS (2).) If your apronym is unintentionally similar to another one but was thought of independently, it will be added with no mention of the other apronym. No apronym will be rejected as a result of it being similar to an existing one... although it might not be added as a separate apronym. You will always get credit for an acronym which you contributed to, even if you only contributed one word. However if someone submits a modification of your apronym which is added separately, although your apronym will be referred to in the credit, for the purposes of the hall of fame you are not counted as having contributed another apronym.
Abbreviations may be apronymised, but will usually only be accepted if more than one word in the expansion differs from the word(s) which the abbreviation actually represents.
