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by Relsqui on January 28th, 2005
From the Jargon File:
"[portmanteau of back + acronym] A word interpreted as an acronym that was not originally so intended. This is a special case of what linguists call back formation. Examples are given under recursive acronym (Cygnus), Acme, and mung. Discovering backronyms is a common form of wordplay among hackers. Compare retcon."
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/B/backronym.html
I highly recommend that source for all kinds of geek linguistics questions.
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