July 26 - Happy Birthday, FBI

Posted on July 26, 2022

Key points

This is an update of my post published on July 26, 2011:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation was created on this day in 1908. It is, in a way, the United States’ national police department, because the FBI has jurisdiction in more than 200 categories of federal crime. The FBI also is the “intelligence agency” that gathers information from inside the country for the purposes of national security.

(The CIA and NSA both operate as intelligence agencies involved with data gathering NOT inside the country, but instead around the world.)

Did you know that FBI is an abbreviation for “Federal Bureau of Investigation,” but it’s not an acronym? An acronym is a word you can pronounce, with at least one vowel per syllable, created from initial letters or word parts. FBI is just the initial letters that we pronounce as letters; it would have to be pronounced something like “febbie” to be an acronym. Examples of acronyms are NASA (“National Aeronautics and Space Administration”) and scuba (“self-contained underwater breathing apparatus”).

But though FBI is not an acronym, the organization does feature a backronym. A backronym is a phrase created especially to start with certain letters; in other words, it is sort of the opposite of an acronym. The FBI’s backronym is its motto: Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity.

You can see the motto in the little yellow ribbon in the FBI’s logo. And on this statue and on FBI merch and and and…