What Does SCP Stand For?

What does SCP stand for in each field?

If the letters come with a dash and a number, you are almost surely looking at the fiction meaning. If they come in lowercase inside a line of code, it is the copy tool.

The SCP Foundation: Secure, Contain, Protect

The SCP Foundation is a shared writing project that started on an online forum in the late 2000s and grew into a huge collection of short stories. Each story is written like a classified report from a secret group that captures strange objects, creatures and places. The group's motto spells out the letters:

• Secure the anomaly so no one else can reach it.
• Contain it so it cannot escape or cause harm.
• Protect the public, and sometimes the anomaly itself.

Many fans say the letters first came from the heading "Special Containment Procedures," the part of each report that explains how to keep the item locked away. The motto was later fitted to the same initials. Both readings are common among readers, and both point to the same story world.

Secure Copy Protocol in computing

In tech, SCP names both a method and a command line tool for copying files between computers over an encrypted link. It runs on top of SSH, the secure shell connection that admins use to log in to remote machines, so passwords and file contents are not sent in plain text.

A typical line looks like scp notes.txt user@server:/home/user/. That copies a local file to a folder on another machine. The command is written in lowercase because that is how it is typed. Many admins now prefer newer transfer methods for large jobs, but the scp command is still found on most Unix style systems. For older, unencrypted file moves, see FTP.

Less common SCP meanings

Outside of stories and servers, SCP turns up in some technical niches. In food and farming research, single cell protein is protein made by growing tiny living things such as yeast or algae, often for animal feed. In the phone industry, a Service Control Point is a network database that tells switches how to route certain calls, such as toll free numbers.

Schools, clubs and companies also use SCP as a local code, so a flyer or a work email may give it a meaning of its own. When the letters show up with no context, ask what they mean in that setting.

How to say and write SCP

Say it as three letters, "S C P." No one says it as a word. Spoken aloud, S is "ess," which opens on a vowel, so write "an SCP story," "an SCP transfer."

• For the fiction, write capital letters with a hyphen before the number: SCP-049.
• For the command, write lowercase scp inside code, and capital SCP when you talk about the protocol in a sentence.
• No periods. S.C.P. is not used in any of these fields.

Since you read each letter aloud, SCP is an initialism. Learn more about that label on what is an acronym.

SCP in everyday sentences

• "My little brother is obsessed with SCP stories and draws the monsters."
• "The new horror game borrows a lot from SCP lore."
• "Can you scp the log file over to the test box?"
• "Our IT team blocks scp from guest laptops."
• "The lab is testing single cell protein, or SCP, as a fish feed."

Daily life is full of letter sets like this, and the famous acronyms collection gathers many of them.