List of abbreviations and acronyms

Question

I am searching an list of abbreviations,acronyms which should be downloadable as a sql table or json or sth. like that so no api cause it might be not fast enough or has a limit like this one: http://www.abbreviations.com/abbr_api.php

Of course the data needs to have two columns:

abbr and the correct name

but it would be nice to have extra information like categories.

Edit:

I would like to have English acronyms but more languages would be nice as well.

Edit:

Think that this list is a good example but unfortunately not so easy to parse: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acronyms

Answer 1

I found a github repository that scrapes the wiki list of roughly 6000 acronyms

https://github.com/krishnakt031990/Crawl-Wiki-For-Acronyms

raw acronyms file

and then I wrote this python script to read that code's output and clean it up, as well as put it into a valid CSV (gist)

#!/usr/bin/env python
# coding=utf-8

ignore_list = ('Search-Navigation','Tools-What links','Top-','Contents','Magyar')
with open('AcronymsFile.csv','r') as inp:
    data = inp.read().split('\n')

with open('clean_AcronymsFile.csv','w') as out:
    out.write('acronym'+'\t'+'definition'+'\n')

    for line in data:
        if not line.startswith(ignore_list):
            tmp = line.split('-')
            acronym = tmp[0].strip()
            definition = '-'.join([x.strip() for x in tmp[1:]])

            out.write(acronym+'\t'+definition+'\n')

writes this CSV output (tab separated): gist (still needs some cleaning)

sample header:

acronym definition
0D  Zero-dimensional
1AM Air mechanic 1st class
1D  One-dimensional
2AM Air mechanic 2nd class

Answer 2

There doesn't seem to be a proper open acronym project, unfortunately.

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Data source

The best solution at the moment seems to be Wiktionary, which has a category called Initialism (a synonym for acronym)

See, for example

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/AAAA

The good part about Wiktionary.org:

• multiple languages

• links to Wikipedia pages (not all, though), which gives you a chance at creating categories or clusters

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Export

Because Wiktionary is part of the Mediawiki project, there are tons of robust tools for exporting the data.

Each media website/language has a regular database dump

• Overview page

• Backup index (download page)

• Most recent English Wiktionary dump - https://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiktionary/20150702

• All pages, current versions only (569.6 MB) - https://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiktionary/20150702/enwiktionary-20150702-pages-meta-current.xml.bz2

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Import

• Resources page

• Tools for importing

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The annoying part will be that you have to import everything, and then parse out the initialisms and their meanings. Because the data is open, if you go this far, you are invited to make the tools open source and then the community can build a front-end website of the wiktionary acronym data.