OT: Old Big 8 abbreviations

[sailwi]

I have asked this question a number of times but no one has ever had an answer, why do the old Big 8 schools like Kansas, Nebraska abbreviate the school as  KU and NU instead of UK and UN.  I have googled and asked alum but no one seems to know, hopefully some enlightened person on the board knows.

[GGGG]

I don't know the answer, but I think you mean University of Oklahoma and OU.  The University of Nebraska Lincoln isn't known and NU...but as UNL.

[bma725]

I don't know the answer, but I think you mean University of Oklahoma and OU.  The University of Nebraska Lincoln isn't known and NU...but as UNL.

You might want to tell the university, they refer to themselves as NU their own homepage and have named one of their arenas the NU Coliseum.

For sports purposes, they are NU.  For academic, they are UNL.

[ChicosBailBonds]

I have asked this question a number of times but no one has ever had an answer, why do the old Big 8 schools like Kansas, Nebraska abbreviate the school as  KU and NU instead of UK and UN.  I have googled and asked alum but no one seems to know, hopefully some enlightened person on the board knows.

When I attended KU back in the early 1990's for graduate school, I asked the same question.  The answer....because it's always been that way.


Here's what the University of Colorado says about it


Why is the University of Colorado know as CU and not UC or U of C?
The same applies at Kansas-KU, Missouri-MU, Nebraska-NU, Oklahoma-OU and Denver-DU. "Midwestern casualness," says former CU historian Fred Casotti. It has always been this way at Colorado, for whatever reason, and at the other five listed above-but seemingly nowhere else in the USA. In the 1950s, there was a concerted effort to eliminate the use of "CU" on the Boulder campus, both as a symbol and in speech, but Casotti said that no one would buy into it. "Nobody would change," he said. "It's easier to say than U of C, UC sounds like slang or something (as in 'you see'), and it was traditional. By trying to eliminate it, they reinforced it."

[GGGG]

You might want to tell the university, they refer to themselves as NU their own homepage and have named one of their arenas the NU Coliseum.

For sports purposes, they are NU.  For academic, they are UNL.

Huh....I honestly have never seen them referred to as NU....but you are correct.

[rocky_warrior]

It all goes back to the state schools of the original big 8, but beyond that I haven't found any good reason to call the "University of Colorado" "CU".  Nonetheless, that's how it is...which is basically what Chicos and BMA posted too.