Alphabet soup is a kind of soup containing noodles shaped like the letters of an alphabet.

Alphabet soup is usually a prepared, canned tomato soup with letter-shaped noodles. It is traditionally popular with American children, and may be served by parents or schools to encourage young children to learn to read.

Spelling words with alphabet-soup noodles is usually a mildly tolerated form of "playing with food".

Metaphorical sense

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In the metaphorical sense, the term is used to describe an abundance of abbreviations or acronyms. In this sense, the term goes back at least as far as Franklin D. Roosevelt's alphabet agencies of the New Deal.

In the United States one of the most common targets of the term is the Federal Government on account of the multitude of agencies that it has spawned, including the NSA, CIA, FBI, USSS, BATF, DEA and INS.

At times, the Central Asian republics (such as Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan) that gained independence after the fall of the Soviet Union have been called "alphabet soup countries" because of their long and consonant-filled names.

Soups