TLA

Definitions

1. Short for 'Three-Letter Acronym', a self-referential joke term for the dense thicket of abbreviations that pervades computing and corporate speech. TLA is itself a TLA, which is the entire point. The construction spawned deliberate escalations such as ETLA, or 'Extended Three-Letter Acronym', denoting a four-letter one, and the recursive RTLA. Beneath the humour sits a real complaint: acronym-saturated jargon functions as a barrier to entry, and the term is often deployed precisely when someone has stacked too many of them into one sentence.