Acronym Glossary Builder
Paste a report, document, or email. All acronyms in capital letters are detected automatically. Add definitions and copy a formatted glossary.
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Every industry has its acronym problem. Documents get written with abbreviations that are obvious to the author and opaque to half the audience.
A glossary appended to a report, proposal, or briefing document is a small thing that significantly improves readability for anyone not deep in the subject. This tool does the tedious part, scanning for all the capital-letter sequences, so you just add the definitions and copy the result.
How we work it out
The tool scans your text for sequences of 2-8 capital letters (and numbers) using whole-word matching. Common short words like "I," "A," "AN," "IN," and well-known abbreviations that do not need defining are filtered from the results. Duplicates are removed and the list is sorted alphabetically.
Common mistakes
- Defining the same acronym two different ways in one document.
- Missing an acronym because it is not written in capital letters.
- Not spelling out the acronym the first time it is used.
Questions
It detected something that is not an acronym. Can I remove it?
The detection is pattern-based: any 2-8 capital letter sequence qualifies. Proper nouns written in full capitals (like company names styled as "ACME") will appear. Simply leave the definition field blank and it will appear as [definition] in the glossary, which you can delete after copying.
What is the tab-separated format for?
Tab-separated output pastes cleanly into Excel or Google Sheets as two columns: acronym and definition. From there you can format it as a table. The list format is better for pasting directly into a Word document or email.
TBH the TPS report can wait.