Acronym Extractor & Glossary Builder

Theses, reports, standards and manuals usually need a list of abbreviations, and style guides require every abbreviation to be defined the first time it appears. Compiling the list by hand means rereading the whole document. This tool scans the text for abbreviations, picks up the definitions you already wrote, and flags the ones you never defined.

What is found

Any word written in capital letters with at least two characters is treated as a possible abbreviation: WHO, GDP, NASA, API, RCT. Digits and ampersands are allowed, so G7 and R&D count. A lower-case plural s is recognised, so SSRIs is listed under SSRI. Short Roman numerals such as II and IV are skipped.

Finding the definitions

Writers usually define an abbreviation in one of two ways: the long form followed by the abbreviation in brackets, as in “World Health Organization (WHO)”, or the abbreviation followed by its long form, as in “ESA (European Space Agency)”. The tool recognises both. To avoid picking up the wrong words, it checks that the initials of the long form spell the abbreviation, allowing small words such as “of” and “and” to be skipped and allowing a word to contribute more than one letter. So “Centers for Disease Control and Prevention” matches CDC through Centers, Disease and Control, with “for” skipped and “and Prevention” left out.

Undefined abbreviations

The summary counts how many abbreviations are never spelled out, and a filter shows only those. These are the ones to fix: define each at first use in the text, or at least give it a meaning in the list.

Sorting and exporting

Sort alphabetically for a glossary, or by first use to check that each abbreviation is defined where it first appears. The list downloads as a CSV for spreadsheets, as plain text with one “ABBR — meaning” line each, or as a Markdown table for documentation sites and README files.

False positives

A list built from capital letters will catch some words that are not abbreviations: a word written in capitals for emphasis, a heading in capitals, or a product name. Scan the list and delete those before publishing.

A worked example

In the sample about the WHO and CDC, four definitions are found — WHO, CDC, RCT and ESA — including “Centers for Disease Control and Prevention”, where the acronym skips the last word. Five abbreviations are listed as undefined: SSRI (found through its plural SSRIs), GDP, OECD, NASA and API, telling the author exactly which meanings to add.

Private

Documents stay in your browser; nothing is uploaded, which matters for unpublished theses and internal reports.

Tips for a clean glossary

Define each abbreviation the first time it appears in the main text, not only in the list, because many readers jump straight to a chapter. Sort by first use to check that order. Keep the long forms consistent: if the text says “World Health Organization” in one place and “World Health Organisation” in another, pick one spelling before building the final list.

Related tools

Find how terms are used with the Concordance Generator, count term frequency with the Word Frequency Counter, format references with the Citation Generator, or fix terms across a document with Find and Replace.