Acronyms are linguistic signs composed of the initial components of other signs, therefore a codification process is needed to find their meaning. Usually, people are able to evaluate whether a sign is an acronym by considering its grammatical form and its phonic aspect. For instance, signs as "WWW" (i.e.,WorldWide Web) or "btw" (i.e., by the way) are easily identified as acronyms, although sometimes their meaning can be unknown. On the other hand, acronyms as "radar" and "laser" can be exchanged for simple nouns both from a grammatical and a phonetic perspective. We hypothesize the existence of a relation between the identification (i.e., the correct classification) of an acronym and its Shannon entropy. In order to investigate this hypothesis, we define an agent-based model to study the spreading dynamics of acronyms. Numerical simulations of the proposed model seem to confirm that the Shannon entropy has a central role in these dynamics. In particular, we found that the number of time steps to identify the solution of an acronym increases with its Shannon entropy. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.