The ACRONYM element provides an encapsulation and enumeration mechanism for acronyms that appear in the body text. For example, consider a web page that includes a discussion of international trade issues. At one point in the document, the acronym GATT is used for General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. A spelling checker, language translation program, or speech synthesizer might choke on this acronym; a search engine would not include the word "tariffs" in its relevancy rating calculation. But by turning the GATT text into an ACRONYM element (and assigning a TITLE attribute to it), you can provide a full-text equivalent that a search engine (if so equipped) can count; a text-to-speech program would read aloud the full meaning of the acronym. Like many elements new in HTML 4.0, this one is intended to assist browser technologies that may not yet be implemented but could find their way to products of the future.

A related element, ABBR, offers the same services for words that are abbreviations. Both elements are part of a larger group of what the HTML 4.0 recommendation calls phrase elements.

An advisory description of the element. For the ACRONYM element, it plays a vital role in providing a hidden full-text description of the acronym rendered in the document.