Today Rachel gave me a quiz a bunch of acronyms. I never ever thought "boy I wonder what CVS stands for"
Here are a bunch of them. Who knew?
CVS stands for Consumer Value Stores.
WD-40 stands for Water Displacement - 40th Attempt. (That's how long it took the manufacturers to figure out the recipe.)
M&Ms stands for Mars & Murrie’s, the last names of the candy’s founders.
PAM stands for Product of Arthur Meyerhoff.
NECCO stands for New England Confectionery Company.
YAHOO stands for Yet Another Hierarchical Official Oracle.
TASER stands for Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle.
Your ZIP code is actually your Zone Improvement Plan code.
TIME stands for "The International Magazine of Events."
IKEA stands for Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd, named for the founder's initials and his hometown.
CAPTCHA stands for That code you have to type into websites to prove you're not a robot has a name, and that name is a really complicated acronym. CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.
Laser stands for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.
Canola stands for Canada oil, low acid. There is no canola plant; the oil comes from rapeseed.
GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format.
GEICO stands for Government Employees Insurance Company. The product was first targeted toward government and military employees.
Arby’s is a play on RB, for the chain’s founders, the Raffel brothers.
Nabisco stands for National Biscuit Company.
NERF stands for Non Expandable Recreational Foam.
SPAM stands for Shoulder of Pork and Ham. Here are more odd facts about iconic American products.
A&W stands for its founders, (Roy) Allen and (Frank) Wright.
BMW means Bayerische Motoren Werke, which translates from German to "Bavarian Motor Works."
TCBY stands for The Country's Best Yogurt. It originally stood for, "This Can't Be Yogurt"—until the company was sued by I Can't Believe It's Yogurt!, a rival chain.
3M the company that makes Post-Its and most office supplies, stands for Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing.
FAO Schwartz stands for Frederick August Otto Schwarz, who founded the toy company with his brothers.
H&M stands for Hennes & Mauritz. Originally just called Hennes, the clothing company merged with hunting goods store Mauritz Widforss in 1968, becoming H&M.
AFLAC stands for American Family Life Assurance Company of Columbus.
Disney’s EPCOT stands for Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow. Don't miss these mind-blowing facts about Disneyland.
CD-ROM stands for Compact Disc read-only memory.
SOS…doesn’t stand for anything! It was chosen as a sign of distress for its unmistakable Morse code representation—three dots, three dashes, three dots.
photo: getty images