http://www.cnn.com/2011/LIVING/03/25/oxford.new.words/index.htmlOMG! It is no longer a just a teenage expression, but officially a word found in the dictionary."FYI" (for your information), "LOL" (laughing out loud) and "OMG" (oh my god) are all now formally recognized by the Oxford English Dictionary, one of the world's principal English-language dictionaries.These terms may have resulted from the character limits in texts and tweets, but have since been adopted as commonly used expressions in everyday speech and print.
First off, commonly used in print and speech? Okay, so fyi has been used in speech for a long time. But do people really say l-o-l or o-m-g when talking to others? Wait, on second thought, don't answer that.
Anyways, back on topic, initialisms are not words. They're a string of initials used to represent a phrase. And a phrase can't count as a single word. If these initialisms have been made words, then so should FBI, MRI, PHD, and LED.
Though as a side note, one could make a good argument for recognizing <3 as a word. In their most basic form, words are simply symbols used to express thoughts. And the first written languages (like in Egypt), using drawings as words. Also, Eastern Asia still uses special symbols to represent words. So at least that has some precedence and logic to it.
