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HTML <acronym> Tag

The <acronym> tag tells the browser that the characters it contains are an acronym or abbreviation. Learn with syntax and examples.

The <acronym> tag was used to define an acronym or abbreviation. To provide the full phrase, the global title attribute is used, which displays as a tooltip when you hover over the text.

acronym example

Danger

The <acronym> tag is a deprecated HTML tag and not supported in HTML5. Use the <abbr> tag instead.

Syntax

The <acronym> tag comes in pairs. The content is written between the opening (<acronym>) and closing (</acronym>) tags.

Example of the HTML <acronym> tag:

HTML acronym Tag

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Title of the document</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>Hover the mouse cursor over acronym HTML</p>
    <acronym title="Hyper Text Markup Language">HTML</acronym>
  </body>
</html>
Try it Yourself »

In the following example, the <abbr> tag is used instead of <acronym>. The browser renders the characters within the <abbr> tag as an abbreviation or an acronym.

Example of the HTML <abbr> tag:

HTML abbr tag

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Title of the document</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p><abbr title="Universal Resource Locator">URL</abbr> - This is a special form of designating an individual resource address on the Internet </p>
  </body>
</html>
Try it Yourself »

Default styling

Modern browsers apply no default styling to the <acronym> or <abbr> tags. Any visual appearance (such as underlines or small caps) must be defined explicitly with CSS.

Attributes

The <acronym> tag supports the Global Attributes and the Event Attributes.

How to style HTML <acronym> Tag

Since browsers do not apply default styling, you can use CSS to ensure a consistent appearance. Note that styling the <acronym> tag is obsolete since the tag itself is deprecated. The following example styles the <abbr> tag (the modern replacement) with a dotted underline and small caps:

abbr {
  text-decoration: underline dotted;
  font-variant: small-caps;
}

Practice

Practice

What is the function of the <acronym> tag in HTML?