alphabet soup

plural alphabet soups

1. countableuncountableA type of soup that contains noodles in the shape of various alphabetical letters, sometimes also numbers.

   Meronym: alfabeto

   1 more example

   Parents have been entertaining their children at mealtime with alphabet soup since the nineteenth century.

2. countablefigurativelyuncountableA cryptic overabundance of acronyms and abbreviations.

   The various engineering teams' correspondence on circuit board design was an alphabet soup to outsiders.

   2 more examples

   And particularly in headlines and written materials, gay was used over LGBT. One ambivalent heterosexual ally explained this decision-making: I think there were several people who were sensitive to issues like that about do we use the word lesbian? Do we use the word transgender? And it's not that we didn't use those words, but in general, if you're doing a brochure and you have a headline, you don't include the whole alphabet soup.

   2006, Amy L. Stone, More than adding a T: transgender inclusion in Michigan gay rights ordinances, 1992-2000

   GCN has published debates between and about Left groups like the Revolutionary Socialist League, Workers World Party, and Philadelphia Worokers Organizing Committee, but their debates are likely to leave the uninitiated in a daze. For folks who are new to the Left, the multitude of group acronyms must seem like an alphabet soup ― RSL, WWP, PWOC, SWP, CPML, NAM, DCSO, etc. ― and they are likely to have no appetite for it.

   1980 February 9, Scott Tucker, “The Lavender Left”, in Gay Community News, volume 7, number 28, page 5

3. countablefigurativelymetonymicallyuncountableA quantity of people or organizations that are referred to by acronyms.

   too many three-letter agencies, constituting an alphabet soup

4. countablefigurativelyparticleuncountablenatural sciencesA physical state in which there is a miscellany of different particles, often designated by letters.

   This part of the neutron star has been described as ‘a rich Greek alphabet soup’.

   1978, Patrick Moore, 1978 Yearbook of Astronomy, page 172

   2 more examples

   The early big bang is an alphabet soup of quarks, W bosons, gluons, and other exotic particles and flavors. In the usual scenario, there is no place for the pion. It dissociates in the alphabet soup of the early universe.

   1997, Nee-Pong Chang, “Chirality in the Early Universe”, in Ling Fong Li et al., editors, Looking to the 21st Century: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Frontiers of Physics, →ISBN, page 784

   At shorter distances (probed at higher energies), an alphabet-soup of other types of spin 0 (scalar) and spin 1 (vector) mesons are exchanged […]

   2012, Walter M. Wilcox, Quantum Principles and Particles, →ISBN, page 434

5. countableslanguncountablehobbiesThe series of preliminary races (denoted by letters) through which drivers must advance to the main event.