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An acronym is a word formed from the initial letters or parts of a phrase and pronounced phonetically as an ordinary word (e.g. "laser", "scuba"), rather than letter-by-letter as an initialism.
In official tournament Scrabble (NASPA / WESPA), abbreviations are strictly prohibited—unless they have achieved such total assimilation into English lexical vocabulary that dictionary lexicographers classify them as standard common nouns. The most famous tournament-legal acronyms originated in military and scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century: "laser" (1960), "scuba" (1952), "radar" (1940), "sonar" (1942), "taser" (1974), and "snafu" (1941).
Test if an English word originated as an official acronym:
Verified English words exemplifying tournament-legal acronyms (word-pronounced coinages) with Scrabble scores
Linguistic definitions, etymological origins, and tournament usage
An acronym is pronounced phonetically as a single spoken word (e.g. "laser", "scuba", "NASA"). An initialism is pronounced as a series of individual letter names (e.g. "FBI", "HTML", "USA").