New ORCA acronym listings page

Just for a bit of extra organisation, there is now an alphabetical listing of acronyms featured in ORCA.

ORCA - the Organisation of Really Contrived Acronyms

The obvious, though possibly not best, acronym to kick things off is ORCA itself:

ORCA: The Organisation of Really Contrived Acronyms. orca noun any of various whales, esp. the killer whale.

organisation noun a group of people formed into a society, union, or especially business.

really adv. very; genuinely

contrived adj. forced or artificial.

acronym noun a word made from the first letters or syllables of other words.

ORCA was founded in 2004 by Rich Edwards, then a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Prof Denis Shields at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. I’m not sure now where these definitions come from (possibly OED online) but I have decided to stick with the original 2004 definitions. The term “Organisation” is a bit of a stretch but then these are contrived acronyms.

ORCA is an ad hoc acronym - until we discover that cetaceans are prolific abbreviators, at least. (Who knows what those clicks and whistles mean‽)

Resurrecting the beast

ORCA, the Organisation for Really Contrived Acronyms, has been dormant for many years. ORCA was created as a fun little side-project when I was a postdoc at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and was in the middle of a particularly productive spell of contrived acronym names for bioinformatics programs - many of them mine!

In the years since it has dwindled and ultimately disappeared when the old server hosting it perished. Recently, however, an acronym emailed to me by a friend reminded me of the old project and I did a little Google search for “organisation of really contrived acronyms”. The old site, long gone, was not found but there were three hits. One was a Facebook competition post by the Canadian Museum of Nature from March 2009:

Trivia Game—Whales Tohorā
What do the Oral Cancer Awareness Foundation, Ireland’s Organisation of Really Contrived Acronyms, and the Ontario Region Ceramic Association have in common?

This game is inspired by
Whales Tohorā
at the Canadian Museum of Nature
March 2 – September 3, 2012

For some reason, this inspired me to resurrect the old beast! Acronyms to follow…