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Scuba diving, Scuba
& Snorkeling
A portable apparatus containing
compressed air and used for breathing under water. Going scuba
diving sounds much more appealing than going self-contained
underwater breathing apparatus diving, and saying scuba
leaves more breath for swimming. The name for such an apparatus, first
successfully tested in 1943, was formed by taking the first letter of
each word in the phrase and putting them together to form a single
word. Scuba, like other acronyms, has a vowel at a point that
allows it to be pronounced like an English word. The word, first
recorded in 1952, has been so widely adopted that people rarely think
of it as a collection of initials and use it in forming other words,
such as scuba-dive. In fact, a verb scuba was first
recorded in 1973 and is still in use.
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