Acronym & abbreviation auditor
Finds every acronym in your document, checks whether it's expanded on first use, and builds a glossary you can copy straight into your docs.
Your text never leaves your browser.
Paste a document above to audit its acronyms and build a glossary.
| Acronym | Expansion | Status | Uses | Actions |
|---|
Your text, annotated
Never expanded or conflicting Worth a look — select a highlight for details. Only the first use of each acronym is highlighted.
Findings
What counts as an acronym problem
"Expand every acronym on first use" is in nearly every documentation style guide, and it's one of the most common complaints in docs review — right up there with passive voice. This tool checks it automatically: every acronym gets checked against the rest of the document for whether it was expanded, whether that expansion came before its first use, and whether every expansion in the document agrees with every other one.
Never expanded
The main finding. An acronym used repeatedly with no expansion anywhere in the document forces every unfamiliar reader to go looking elsewhere for what it means.
Expanded too late
The document does define the term — just not before it's already been used. A reader who starts at the top hits the acronym before its definition; a reader who jumps to a middle section never sees the definition at all.
Expanded two conflicting ways
The same three letters mean two different things in the same document — "CI" as Continuous Integration in one section and Configuration Item in another. This is the highest-severity finding, because it's not a style nitpick, it's the document actually contradicting itself.
Defined but never reused
The opposite failure: an expansion was written out, in parentheses, and the abbreviation was never used again. The parenthetical did nothing except add length — if you're not going to reuse the short form, skip the definition and just use the full term.
Why common acronyms are ignored by default
No style guide expects "API," "PDF," or "HTTP" to be expanded in a technical document — doing so would be more distracting than helpful for the intended audience. This tool ships with an allowlist of roughly 150 such acronyms and ignores them by default. Turn the toggle off if you're writing for an audience where that assumption doesn't hold — medical, aviation, and government documentation often expand everything, common or not, and the toggle lets the tool go back to being noisy on purpose for exactly that case.