Alphabet soup is a metaphor for an abundance of

abbreviation An abbreviation (from Latin ''brevis'', meaning ''short'') is a shortened form of a word or phrase, by any method. It may consist of a group of letters or words taken from the full version of the word or phrase; for example, the word ''abbrevia ...

s or

acronym An acronym is a word or name formed from the initial components of a longer name or phrase. Acronyms are usually formed from the initial letters of words, as in ''NATO'' (''North Atlantic Treaty Organization''), but sometimes use syllables, as ...

s, named for a common dish made from

alphabet pasta Alphabet pasta, also referred to as alfabeto and alphabetti spaghetti in the UK, is a pasta that has been mechanically cut or pressed into the letters of the alphabet. It is often served in an alphabet soup, sold in a can of condensed broth. An ...

. Its use dates at least as far back as Franklin D. Roosevelt's

alphabet agencies The alphabet agencies, or New Deal agencies, were the U.S. federal government agencies created as part of the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The earliest agencies were created to combat the Great Depression in the United States ...

of the

New Deal The New Deal was a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1939. Major federal programs agencies included the Civilian Con ...

. In the United States, the

federal government A federation (also known as a federal state) is a political entity characterized by a union of partially self-governing provinces, states, or other regions under a central federal government ( federalism). In a federation, the self-gover ...

is described as an alphabet soup on account of the multitude of agencies that it has spawned, including the

NSA The National Security Agency (NSA) is a national-level intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collec ...

CIA The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, ...

, FBI, USSS, ATF, DEA,

EPA The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is an independent executive agency of the United States federal government tasked with environmental protection matters. President Richard Nixon proposed the establishment of EPA on July 9, 1970; it be ...

, NCIS,

IRS The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is the revenue service for the United States federal government, which is responsible for collecting U.S. federal taxes and administering the Internal Revenue Code, the main body of the federal statutory tax ...

and

INS INS or Ins or ''variant'', may refer to: Places * Ins, Switzerland, a municipality * Creech Air Force Base (IATA airport code INS) * Indonesia, ITF and UNDP code INS Biology *'' Ins'', a New World genus of bee flies * INS, the gene for the insulin ...

. In 1938, a US barbershop harmony organization was founded, aptly named

SPEBSQSA The Barbershop Harmony Society, legally and historically named the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America, Inc. (SPEBSQSA), is the first of several organizations to promote and preserve barbershop ...

or the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America, as a humorous lampoon to these numerous "alphabet soup" agencies. The alphabet soup metaphor has been used to describe issues in comprehension that have major effects on scholarship, including confusion between different theories. One such example of alphabet soup affecting scholarship is in statistical testing, in which distinction between p and α are not always made clear because of the "alphabet soup" of letters referring to statistical evidence and errors. The many distinctions between types of

pneumonia Pneumonia is an inflammatory condition of the lung primarily affecting the small air sacs known as alveoli. Symptoms typically include some combination of productive or dry cough, chest pain, fever, and difficulty breathing. The severit ...

have also been described as an alphabet soup, requiring a scholarly article detailing the differences between the many acronyms. Alphabet soup has also been used to describe longer initialisms based on ''

LGBT ' is an initialism that stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. In use since the 1990s, the initialism, as well as some of its common variants, functions as an umbrella term for sexuality and gender identity. The LGBT term ...

'' such as ''LGBTQQIAAP''. Alphabet soup is also used to describe historical language scripts that appear as long sequences of symbols that do not have clear demarcations of words.

References

Sociolinguistics {{Sociolinguistics-stub