Many techniques for the acceleration and deceleration of CNC machine tools have been proposed in order to make CNC machine tools perform given machining tasks efficiently. Since they should be calculated in a limited time, most of them are not computationally intensive. However, these previous techniques cannot generate velocity profiles having some kinds of acceleration and deceleration characteristics though they can generate velocity profiles having various acceleration and deceleration characteristics. This paper proposes a generalized approach for generating velocity profiles which cannot be generated by previous techniques as well as velocity profiles generated by them. According to the desired characteristics of acceleration and deceleration, each set of coefficients is calculated and is stored. Given a moving distance, an acceleration interval, and a deceleration interval for CNC machine tools, a velocity profile having the desired characteristics of acceleration and deceleration can be efficiently generated by using these coefficients. It will be shown how to generate typical velocity profiles by the proposed technique.