Recursive acronym

A recursive acronym is one where the original term (acronym) appears as an element in the expansion of the original term; i.e. the expansion in theory goes on forever. They were a bit of charming whimsy that appeared at MIT (possibly in the name of the editor EINE - 'EINE is not EMACS'), and more a while it was the fashion there to name text editors with such names. The practise was not restricted to editors, though; for example, the Nimrod routing architecture had a recursive acronym ('Nimrod: It Might Run One Day') - although in tat case it was a 'backronym' (the name existed before the expansion was created).