UNHCR stands for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees — a large agency inside the UN whose job is to protect and help people who have been forced to leave their own country because of war, violence or persecution. In practice it is the organisation you see running refugee camps, handing out blankets and tents, registering families so they officially exist on paper, and arguing with governments about the rights of people who have nowhere to go. Note what the letters actually spell: the R is refugees, not relief, and the C is Commissioner, a person's job title, not commission. The agency was named after its head official, and over time the name came to mean the whole organisation — so today you can read about the UNHCR High Commissioner, which sounds like a repetition but is normal. Officially the agency now calls itself "UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency", and that second name is what you will hear on television, because the letters mean nothing to most people. In writing it takes the, and it is said letter by letter: U-N-H-C-R. It belongs to formal registers — news, essays, school reports, NGO writing — and one useful thing for a student is that it very often appears as the source of a number: "according to UNHCR figures". If you are writing an argument essay about migration, this is the name you cite.