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by joezydeco 855 days ago
Pet peeve: it's ALDI, not Aldi. It's an acronym for ALbrecht-DIskont.
1 comments

Acronyms under most English style guides should be written in lowercase with the first letter capitalized. Only initialisms should be in all caps, which Aldi is definitely not.

e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/17/business/aldi-winn-dixie-...

e.g. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63015985

Aldi's corporate style is "ALDI" but that's just their internal guidance, not the rules of English.

I almost always see most acronyms (not brands with an acronym origin like Aldi) in all caps, and always considered it an odd quirk of the BBC that they did not.

E.g. The NYT itself: https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=nato

Even the Daily Mail: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=nato+site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2F...

But apparently the Guardian doesn't do the all-caps either. Are there any American publications/style guides that don't do all-caps?

Editors will make exceptions to general style guidelines when they think it leads to better clarity when reading. For instance, most newspapers will write iPhone with a lower case 'i', despite that being incorrect for a proper noun, because people are used to seeing it that way.