As new technologies, practices, and organisations develop, we increasingly see dual-meanings being assigned to Three Letter Acronyms (TLAs) specifically, and other acronyms in general. This method is proposed as a novel approach to a less-lossy compression of the phrases than simply taking the first letter, resulting in a short string of digits which can be specified to increase clarity. The digits are derived algorithmically from the number of vowels, and the frequency of repeating characters in the phrase. For example: Three Letter Acronym can be stated as TLA67, whilst 'Three Legged Arachnid' is stated as TLA78. The latter has one more vowel overall, and one more repeated character overall. This method can be used to derive a 'fingerprint' of the original phrase without retaining significantly more data from it. This system is not perfect, but provides a surprisingly robust distinction for most strings which share a common acronym. It is not limited to Three Letter Acronyms, but can but used when abbreviating any phrase. I've nicknamed this method 'TLA67'
Created by E T Sisson, 2023