Tla

3 definitions found

From Virtual Entity of Relevant Acronyms (Version 1.9, June 2002) [vera]:

  TLA
       Three Letter Acronym (slang)
       
       

From Jargon File (4.3.1, 29 Jun 2001) [jargon]:



  TLA /T-L-A/ n. [Three-Letter Acronym] 1. Self-describing abbreviation
     for a species with which computing terminology is infested. 2. Any
     confusing acronym. Examples include MCA, FTP, SNA, CPU, MMU, SCCS, DMU,
     FPU, NNTP, TLA. People who like this looser usage argue that not all
     TLAs have three letters, just as not all four-letter words have four
     letters. One also hears of `ETLA' (Extended Three-Letter Acronym,
     pronounced /ee tee el ay/) being used to describe four-letter acronyms;
     the terms `SFLA' (Stupid Four-Letter Acronym), `LFLA' (Longer Four
     Letter Acronym), and VLFLA (Very Long Five Letter Acronym) have also
     been reported. See also {YABA}.
  
     The self-effacing phrase "TDM TLA" (Too Damn Many...) is often used to
     bemoan the plethora of TLAs in use. In 1989, a random of the
     journalistic persuasion asked hacker Paul Boutin "What do you think will
     be the biggest problem in computing in the 90s?" Paul's straight-faced
     response: "There are only 17,000 three-letter acronyms." (To be exact,
     there are 26^3 = 17,576.) There is probably some karmic justice in the
     fact that Paul Boutin subsequently became a journalist.
  
  

From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (27 SEP 03) [foldoc]:

  TLA
       
          {Three-Letter Acronym}