From ASAP to WYSIWYG: Business English Acronyms Explained

If you use English in a corporate setting, knowing common business acronyms and their meanings is essential to your job. Imagine you receive an email from work. After the usual “I hope everything is great” and general niceties, it announces that there is an important meeting. You read, “Time and date TBA, and FYI we will make sure that everything is on track to meet the KPI before the end of Q1.”

What?

As if learning a new language wasn’t enough, the wide variety of business acronyms and abbreviations in English can seem like a different language altogether. Sure, you could google them one by one, but that’s very time-consuming.

This comprehensive guide will help you better understand corporate abbreviations and memorize them in a way that makes sense. Once you know these, you'll soon be using business communication like a pro!

Emails and messages

Let’s start with a set of acronyms that are not business-specific but nonetheless appear in a lot of business communication. In business, there’s a lot of writing and messaging and checking older messages to understand when the boss will be around. In this type of written communication, being brief is key, so you will find a lot of acronyms.

Too soon or too late?

In business communication, it’s very important to have a clear idea about deadlines, schedules, times of arrival and other time-related concepts. A variety of acronyms offer a quick reference to time and are used in both day-to-day communication and in business. Let’s look at the most important ones in the table below.

A big, corporate family

“We are all a big family” is probably one of the most used phrases regarding business, but just like in a family, everyone has a role. If you want to speak about a family, you use words like sister, grandfather, uncle, and niece. But if you want to speak about your company, you'd better get familiar with words like CEO, COO, HR, and a whole set of business acronyms.

Common acronyms used in business

This next group of business acronyms are used only in the business world – you won’t see these outside of business contexts. However, they are very common in everyday business communication, so it’s worth spending a little time to learn them.

Pronunciation note

All the acronyms seen so far are initialisms, a type of abbreviation formed by the first letters of a series of words. Initialisms are pronounced as a sequence of individual letters rather than a single word. Unlike other acronyms like NASA (pronounced as a single word) initialisms like FYI, TBA or CEO are pronounced by saying each letter separately, so you would say, ‘F-Y-I,’ ‘T-B-A,’ and ‘C-E-O.’

To do or not to do business?

Some common acronyms refer to complex concepts used when running a business. We could say that these are the philosophical acronyms of our series. Behind these acronyms are business ideas, types of analysis, and frameworks used in reference to project management, marketing and sales. Unlike the previous acronyms we’ve covered, these are pronounced as whole words rather than saying each letter individually. So the first acronym in the table below, SMART, is pronounced just like the word ‘smart’ (not ‘S-M-A-R-T’). In this way, saying these terms is faster and feels more natural in conversation, improving communication efficiency.

Wrapping up

Learning business English and its many acronyms can feel like studying a whole new language, but mastering these terms opens the door to effective communication in professional settings. Acronyms like CEO, FYI, and KPI are everywhere, from work-related social media like LinkedIn to professional emails. Understanding these terms will help you engage with colleagues and clients.

By building a strong foundation with the business acronyms in this guide, you’re not only learning vocabulary, but also understanding the complex concepts of business communication. Go ahead and put your professional skills to work – you’re ready to speak the language of business on your way to corporate success!