Two directions: the initials of a phrase spell a word (roshei tevot), and a word is expanded into a phrase whose words begin with its letters. Worked: the Talmud reads אנכי, 'I am', as the initials of 'I myself wrote and gave' (אנא נפשי כתבית יהבית), and reads אברהם as a contraction of אב המון, 'father of a multitude'.
Notarikon is the Talmud's own term (from the Greek for shorthand) and its examples are the oldest surviving use of letter-analysis on scripture: the Sages derive the practice from Genesis 17:5, where Abraham's name is given as a compression of av hamon. The Kabbalists extend it until a single word can carry a whole sentence — the forty-two letter name is the doctrine in its most concentrated form — and the same technique underlies every acronym in Hebrew.
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