When V Always Meant Very

A childhood spent decoding acronyms — VLSI, VHDL, VLIW — where the V always, deflatingly, stood for “Very.” And then “Large” quietly took over.

A look back — long before any of the tools we argue about now.

I came to English late. The excuse I leaned on was a childhood of calligraphy lessons and newspapers still printed thick with Chinese characters — a different alphabet to grow up reading. The English that finally stuck arrived sideways: from cramming for the theory section of a computer contest, and from games. So today’s memory is about acronyms — and about how, among all of them, the letter V stood, without exception, for Very. Fascinating and a little deflating at the same time.

IC, LSI, VLSI

The very first entry in the contest’s glossary was IC — Integrated Circuit. To me, circuits were the radio kits the older kids in the neighborhood soldered together, and “integrated” was a foreign idea; in Korean the official rendering was its own small puzzle, a near-homophone away from a different word entirely. Almost in the same breath came LSI — Large Scale Integration — and VLSI — Very Large Scale Integration.

I remember worrying over them in earnest. If Large was already large, how large was Very Large? And what on earth would they call it once it got larger still? It struck me, even then, that whoever coined these had done the hard part — integration — and then reached for the laziest modifiers within arm’s reach. Large. Very. As if the care had simply run out.

VHDL

Freshman year or sophomore year — I can’t place it now — the seniors warned us we’d soon meet a notorious tool: Synopsys, and a language called VHDL. From a worldview where Basic was most of what I knew and C was still a novelty, the idea of describing hardware in a language was startling, and I took to it with more enthusiasm than I expected to.

VHDL, it turned out, stood for VHSIC Hardware Description Language — and VHSIC, in turn, for Very High-Speed Integrated Circuit. There it was again. V for Very. By then I’d stopped chasing the Korean translations altogether. And something nagged at me: for all the super- and ultra- prefixes I knew by heart from watching Dragon Ball, not one of them ever surfaced in these terms. Just Very, over and over.

VLIW

The last skirmish I remember between super and very was in an architecture course: superscalar versus VLIW — Very Long Instruction Word. As an approach it was audacious, rebuilding the machine from the ground up. But measured against the promise that words like super and very carry, the reality — instruction words of 64 to 1,024 bits — felt thin. That’s Very?

My running impression by that point was that very wasn’t much to write home about; the whole vocabulary was oversold. I’d half-concluded that any acronym opening with a V meant one of exactly two things — victory, or very.

LSTM, LLM, LMM

Years later, when AI came back around and I found myself reading papers again, the alphabet had shifted under me. Past the NN, CNN, RNN — things no translation could make legible — a new pair of words kept surfacing: Long and Large. LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory). LLM (Large Language Model). LMM (Large Multimodal Model). Long and Short are relative; fair enough. But LLM’s Large — that one had earned it. This was genuinely big.

Maybe very simply never got its chance. The numbers ballooned so fast, and the word stayed Large the whole way up, that there was no opening for it to slip in. In Korean the field settled on “giant” and “super-giant” language models — and for once I think the loose translation lands better than the literal one would have.

P.S. “Super-giant language model” I can live with. “Super-giant AI,” though, I find quietly unbearable — partly the discomfort of collapsing all of AI into a single model, and partly, I suspect, the occupational hazard of having learned the entire trade in English first, however shallow that English was to begin with.

Part of 90s Computer Science Stories — first-person notes on growing up with computers and studying CS in Korea in the 1980s and ’90s. See the full series →

Adapted from my Korean essay on Brunch: brunch.co.kr/@chaesang/38