RUG becomes ‘yoogee’

The Board of the University has decided that the RUG will henceforth be known as UG (pronounced ‘yoogee’) in English.

The Dutch acronym for the university causes puzzlement abroad, which is why the RUG was quickly designated the UoG, short for University of Groningen. But the Board of the University is now done with that.

Henceforth, the university will use the acronym UG. ‘The UoG acronym was never an official one, but it was used a lot’, says spokesperson Gernant Deekens.

Lack of clarity

According to Deekens, there was a lack of clarity within the university about which acronym should be used. ‘In English texts, people would use RUG and UoG interchangeably. We talked to the Board of the University about that lack of clarity and we decided that from now on we’ll be using UG in English and RUG in Dutch. We now have clear agreements about it.’

Why the much more commonly used UoG was not picked, Deekens does not know. ‘There’s no motivation behind that’, he says. Typographically, the UG acronym matches nicely with the acronyms RUG and UGY (the most commonly used acronym for the future Yantai campus). Moreover, the acronym UoG is also used for many other universities, including the University of Gujrat, University of Guelph, University of Gloucestershire and the University of Guam.

25-11-2015