`<acronym>` HTML acronym or abbreviation element

Deprecated

Avoid using this feature in new projects. This feature may be a candidate for removal from web standards or browsers.

The <acronym> HTML element allows authors to clearly indicate a sequence of characters that compose an acronym or abbreviation for a word.

Warning: Don't use this element. Use the <abbr> element instead.

Attributes

This element only has global attributes, which are common to all elements.

This element implements the HTMLElement interface.

html

<p>
  The <acronym title="World Wide Web">WWW</acronym> is only a component of the
  Internet.
</p>

Though the purpose of this tag is purely for the convenience of the author, its default styling varies from one browser to another:

Opera, Firefox, Chrome, and some others add a dotted underline to the content of the element.
A few browsers not only add a dotted underline, but also put it in small caps; to avoid this styling, adding something like font-variant: none in the CSS takes care of this case.

It is therefore recommended that web authors either explicitly style this element, or accept some cross-browser variation.

Specification
HTML # acronym

This page was last modified on Apr 24, 2026 by MDN contributors.