Recursive Acronyms

I never knew these had a category:

A recursive acronym is an acronym (or occasionally, a backronym) which refers to itself in the expression for which it stands, similar to a recursive abbreviation. Though, because of their lack of a termination condition, perhaps a more accurate term would be circular acronym.

The earliest example is perhaps the credit card VISA, which was named in 1976 as a recursive acronym for VISA International Service Association.

In computing, it soon became a hackish (and especially MIT) tradition to choose acronyms and abbreviations which referred humorously to themselves or to other abbreviations. Perhaps the earliest example in this context, from about 1977 or 1978, is TINT ("TINT Is Not TECO"), an editor for MagicSix. This inspired the two MIT Lisp Machine editors called EINE ("EINE Is Not Emacs") and ZWEI ("ZWEI Was EINE Initially"). (Note that "eine" and "zwei" are German for "[female] one" and "two".)