HTML <acronym> Tag

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The <acronym> tag defines an acronym or abbreviation. To decipher an acronym, the global title attribute is used (displayed as a pop-up text prompt when you hover the mouse over an acronym).

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:

<!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 HTML <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:

<!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

The default styling of the <acronym> tag varies from one browser to another:

Opera, Firefox, Chrome style the content with a dotted underline. And, some other browsers not only add a dotted underline but also put it in small caps.

Attributes

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

How to style <acronym> tag?

Common properties to alter the visual weight/emphasis/size of text in <acronym> tag:

CSS font-style property sets the style of the font. normal | italic | oblique | initial | inherit.
CSS font-family property specifies a prioritized list of one or more font family names and/or generic family names for the selected element.
CSS font-size property sets the size of the font.
CSS font-weight property defines whether the font should be bold or thick.
CSS text-transform property controls text case and capitalization.
CSS text-decoration property specifies the decoration added to text, and is a shorthand property for text-decoration-line, text-decoration-color, text-decoration-style.

Coloring text in <acronym> tag:

CSS color property describes the color of the text content and text decorations.
CSS background-color property sets the background color of an element.

Text layout styles for <acronym> tag:

CSS text-indent property specifies the indentation of the first line in a text block.
CSS text-overflow property specifies how overflowed content that is not displayed should be signalled to the user.
CSS white-space property specifies how white-space inside an element is handled.
CSS word-break property specifies where the lines should be broken.

Other properties worth looking at for <acronym> tag:

CSS text-shadow property adds shadow to text.
CSS text-align-last property sets the alignment of the last line of the text.
CSS line-height property specifies the height of a line.
CSS letter-spacing property defines the spaces between letters/characters in a text.
CSS word-spacing property sets the spacing between words.