Someone was just asking if there were words like lol formed, before, the txtmsg era.

Of course there were - for example "laser".

However .. in fact what was the earliest example of this in English?

Words pronounced as full words - but which started as initials or the initial parts of a series of words.

What is the earliest example of a word like "radar"?

Is there anything like "laser" (laser: 1960) before, let's say, the electric era? Just a wild guess -- did this fad perhaps start with WW2?

So where and when did this begin in English, and what is the earliest example?

Note -- here's a somewhat related question, but the information there is utterly useless. It's astounding that people can't grasp the difference between laser or lol, and, CIA or INRI.

See: Wikipedia for a good discourse on the historical use of acronyms. I knew the Catholic church used the acronym INRI on top of the crucifix for at least 500 to 600 years. A qoute from the Wikipedia article: "Acronyms were used in Rome before the Christian era. For example, the official name for the Roman Empire, and the Republic before it, was abbreviated as SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus). "

An acronym is an abbreviation (or intialism) that's pronounced as a word. They're a relatively modern invention; there are a few earlier examples, but their use really took off during WWII.

INRI?

INRI may be old, but when was INRI introduced into the English language? What evidence is there for people pronouncing it as "inree" in the English language?

WWI

In Douglas Harper's rebuke, '"shit" is not an acronym', he writes that acronyms are very modern inventions. They were found in World War I, but still weren't the preferred way of abbreviation. Their use really took off and became common during World War II, and really accelerated during the cold war and US space programme.

He also notes the use of acrostics, a poem or puzzle such as cabal, where the first initial of an existing word is made of other significant words. However, Harper argues this wordplay had been around for centuries and they aren't really acronyms: the root word already existed and no-one was pretending the initials were the source.

Read the interesting article for more, here's a brief snippet:

Acronyms didn't becom a common method of word formation in English until World War II. The word acronym itself wasn't coined until 1943. The lack of a need for such a word suggests the degree to which acronyms previously were not a part of daily life. Their use accelerated with the U.S. space program and the Cold War, and by the time a "Dictionary of Acronyms, Initialisms and Abbreviations" was published in 1960 it had 12,000 entries.

...

So acronyms in English are on the whole a 20th century phenomenon. Among those with pre-1900 origins are A.D. and B.C. (both Latin) and P.D.Q. (1870s). The word OK (c.1839) is another rare exception (if the most accepted theory of its origins is the right one), as is n.g. for "no good" (1838). And note how these initialisms, even after more than 170 years, are still "felt" as abbreviations, pronounced as distinct letters, and require no elaborate Internet stories.

POTUS & SCOTUS

There are at least a couple of acronyms pronounced as words which predate World War I: POTUS (President of the United States) and SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States), from the Phillips Code used "for the rapid transmission of press reports by telegraph", are from 1895 and perhaps 1879. I'd guess that they weren't originally pronounced as words, but they are now.