[1] In the United States, the federal government is described as an alphabet soup on account of the multitude of agencies that it has spawned, including the NSA, CIA, FBI, USSS, ATF, DEA, EPA, NCIS, IRS and INS.
In 1938, a US barbershop harmony organization was founded, aptly named SPEBSQSA or the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America, as a humorous lampoon to these numerous "alphabet soup" agencies.
The alphabet soup metaphor has been used to describe issues in comprehension that have major effects on scholarship, including confusion between different theories.
[2] The many distinctions between types of pneumonia have also been described as an alphabet soup, requiring a scholarly article detailing the differences between the many acronyms.
[4][5] Alphabet soup is also used to describe historical language scripts that appear as long sequences of symbols that do not have clear demarcations of words.