FAQ

A/An FAQ is a curated list of questions and answers designed to address aspects of a topic that are important, often unknown or misunderstood. It is an acronym that expands to "frequently asked question" or "frequently asked questions". While either expansion implies that questions are often asked, they generally are not. FAQ is more about the question-answer format and an indication of the relevance of the content. Each question may be conglomerated from multiple real questions, what an author anticipates a reader will wonder about, or is simply a way of organizing information.

Although FAQ is commonly used and understood, the term has several grammatical ambiguities:

Two pronunciations

The pronunciation is either as a word (fack) or as each letter (F-A-Q). As such, the indefinite article used is either "a" for the former or "an" for the latter. As both pronunciations are correct, either article is correct.

Two expansions

Oddly for an acronym, it can expand to either of two phrases. The plural form (questions) is the more commonly used, yet the singular (question) is also used.

Usually a list

A common use of FAQ is to refer to a list of question-answer pairs. In this sense, the term is singular (a list), yet the expansion is plural (multiple questions).

Plural form

The term "FAQs" generally refers to multiple FAQ lists. But, if the implied expansion is singular (question), then FAQs could mean multiple questions.