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Definition and abbreviation extractor

Build a glossary automatically by finding where your text defines terms and abbreviations.

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Definition and abbreviation extractor
Paste any document, report or set of meeting notes and this tool scans it for every place a term is introduced — an abbreviation given in parentheses, or a definition sentence like "GDPR means General Data Protection Regulation" — and turns those moments into a ready-made glossary. It's useful for technical writers, students annotating long readings, or anyone handing off a document who wants to make sure every acronym is actually explained somewhere.
Turn on abbreviation detection to catch both directions: a full name followed by its abbreviation in parentheses ("Application Programming Interface (API)") and the reverse ("API (Application Programming Interface)"). Definition-sentence detection looks for phrasing such as "is defined as," "means," "refers to," "stands for" or "is known as," and pulls out the term along with its explanation. Sort the resulting glossary alphabetically or in the order terms first appear, and switch on line and paragraph numbers when you need to trace an entry back to where it came from. Choose whether the result reads as a plain glossary, a Markdown-style table, or a simple bulleted list.
Two checks catch problems a manual read-through easily misses: a warning when an abbreviation is used earlier in the text than the sentence that introduces it, and another when the same abbreviation is defined twice with different meanings — a common source of confusion in long or merged documents. The tool works line by line and treats Windows and Unix line endings the same way, so pasted text from any source produces the same glossary.
Everything runs in your browser: nothing you paste is uploaded or stored anywhere. Copy the glossary, download it as a .txt file, or send the output back into the input to keep refining it before you file it alongside the document it came from. Turn on "Undefined only" and the report flips: you get the all-caps abbreviations the document never expands, each with how often it is used — the shortlist of what still needs a glossary entry.
FAQ
What counts as an abbreviation?
Any all-uppercase token of two to ten letters or digits that appears in parentheses next to a full name, in either order — for example "Text Array (TA)" or "TA (Text Array)".
Which phrases trigger definition detection?
"is defined as," "means," "refers to," "stands for" and "is known as." Turn the option off if your text happens to use those words in an unrelated sense.
What does the early-use warning mean?
It flags an abbreviation that appears in the text before the sentence or parenthesis that introduces it, so a reader would hit an unexplained acronym too soon.
How do I find acronyms the document never explains?
Switch on "Undefined only". The report then lists every all-caps token of two to ten characters that has no expansion anywhere in the text, with a count of how often each is used — an acronym used once may be a typo, one used forty times is a missing glossary entry. Anything the document does expand, in parentheses or in a definition sentence, is left out.
Is my document uploaded anywhere?
No. The extraction runs entirely in your browser — your text never leaves your device.