Kirk Mahoney . com

I often see and hear this.

Problem:
This phrase is redundant.

Explanation:
The initialism “ATM” means Automated Teller Machine, so “ATM Machine” means Automated Teller Machine Machine.

Out of curiosity, I searched with the quotation marks for “ATM machine” at Google and got about 1,460,000 matches. Yikes! This is a fairly common problem (at least on the Web).

It seems to me that people who say or write “ATM Machine” (or “ATM machine”)

• have lost track of the meaning of the individual letters in “ATM”,
• never knew the meaning of the individual letters, or
• are comforted by saying a noun after saying an initialism.

Solutions:
“ATM” or “Automated Teller Machine”