Acronym Replacer 2.0 wraps common acronyms with the acronym tag and a description. It’s pretty simple, just edit the list of acronyms to add your own, and put it in your plugins directory.

For example:

AOL => America Online,
API (Application Programming Interface) => Application Programming Interface,
CD => Compact Disk,

and when you later use “AOL” it will become: <acronym title="America Online">AOL</acronym> (as you can clearly see [:-)])

Note: This is a plugin for WordPress 1.2 and up. Get it here

Edit: May 12, 2004

Version 2.4 is now more aggressive at replacing acronyms. However, it no longer replaces acronyms inside of HTML tags, so it should be safe to create links with defined acronyms in the link or it’s title, without breaking anything, like this: The W3C Standards Organization.

As an additional feature, there is a line in the plugin (near the bottom) which, if uncommented, will allow you to stop acronyms from being replaced by surrounding them with dollar signs ($) which will be removed in processing. I’ve disabled that option myself, since it sems like extra work to me, but if you uncomment it, something like this: “$AOL$” would end up as just plain “AOL” but without the acronym tags.

Edit: June 30, 2004

I just released another version which optimizes things by not re-defining the list each time the plugin is invoked. This should save you a ton of lines of code as you define more acronyms. The new version also includes another fix: to allow acronyms to work on the first word.

Edit: May 5, 2006

Happy cinco de Mayo. I’ve released ubernyms now, so if you’re looking for the best acronym replacer around, that’s the one you want, not this one.