From LQWiki

A hackish (and especially MIT) tradition is to choose acronyms/abbreviations that refer humorously to themselves or to other acronyms/abbreviations. These acronyms are referred to as recursive acronyms. The classic examples were two MIT editors called EINE ("EINE Is Not EMACS") and ZWEI ("ZWEI Was EINE Initially"). More recently, there is a Scheme compiler called LIAR (Liar Imitates Apply Recursively), and GNU stands for "GNU's Not Unix!" -- and a company with the name Cygnus Solutions, which expands to "Cygnus, Your GNU Support" (though Cygnus people say this is a backronym).

This plays on the idea of Recursion, a technique used in programming.

See also

• Humor
• recursive

This article is based, in whole or in part, on entry or entries in the Jargon File.