KL

Abbreviation with 3 meanings

KL
Stands forKLM Royal Dutch Airlines
Meanings3
CategoriesTransportation & Travel, Geography & Places, Technology & Computing

KL has three meanings. The most common are KLM Royal Dutch Airlines (airline code) and Kuala Lumpur (city and neighborhood); it can also stand for Kullback-Leibler (divergence).

Meanings of KL at a glance

#KL stands forContext
1KLM Royal Dutch AirlinesTransportation & Travel › Airline Code
2Kuala LumpurGeography & Places › City and Neighborhood
3Kullback-Leibler (divergence)Technology & Computing › Artificial Intelligence

1. KLM Royal Dutch Airlines

Transportation & Travel · Airline Code Abbreviations

Flag carrier of the Netherlands, based at Amsterdam Schiphol, and part of the Air France-KLM group and SkyTeam. Founded on October 7, 1919, it is the oldest airline still operating under its original name.

Example: KL 643 from Amsterdam to JFK is a 787 with Premium Comfort seats.

ICAO code KLM; callsign "KLM." The initials come from the Dutch Koninklijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij, "Royal Aviation Company." Business-class passengers famously receive small Delft blue houses filled with Dutch gin. KLM was involved in the 1977 Tenerife disaster, the deadliest accident in aviation history.

2. Kuala Lumpur

Geography & Places · City and Neighborhood Abbreviations

Capital and largest city of Malaysia, whose name means muddy confluence in Malay, after its founding as a tin-mining settlement where two rivers meet. The Petronas Twin Towers were the world's tallest buildings from 1998 to 2004.

Example: We took the train from KL Sentral to the airport in under 30 minutes.

Locals and Malaysian media use KL constantly. Most federal government offices moved to the planned city of Putrajaya, but KL remains the official capital and seat of the king and parliament.

3. Kullback-Leibler (divergence)

Technology & Computing · Artificial Intelligence Abbreviations

A measure of how one probability distribution differs from a reference distribution, used throughout machine learning in loss functions, in variational autoencoders and as a penalty that keeps a fine-tuned language model close to its original behavior.

Example: Add a KL penalty so the RLHF policy doesn't drift too far from the base model.

Introduced by Solomon Kullback and Richard Leibler in 1951. KL divergence is not symmetric, so it is not a true distance. Cross-entropy equals the KL divergence plus the entropy of the true distribution. In geography KL is the usual short form of Kuala Lumpur.

More airline code abbreviations

  • HA – Hawaiian Airlines
  • IB – Iberia
  • JL – Japan Airlines
  • KE – Korean Air
  • LA – LATAM Airlines
  • LH – Lufthansa
  • LX – Swiss International Air Lines
  • MH – Malaysia Airlines

See all 60 airline code abbreviations →

More city and neighborhood abbreviations

  • JHB – Johannesburg
  • KC – Kansas City
  • KCK – Kansas City, Kansas
  • KCMO – Kansas City, Missouri
  • LDN – London
  • LES – Lower East Side
  • LI – Long Island
  • LIC – Long Island City

See all 59 city and neighborhood abbreviations →