Word Abbreviations

Shorten these words inside a citation: in party names, places and dates, and in the titles and labels a citation repeats. In your own sentences, write them out (chapter 7). The list is ours, made from what courts write rather than from any manual: the short forms in the case names that 5,179 recent opinion texts cite, plus every word this book’s primary-law chapters shorten. The texts are 4,422 distinct federal opinions from our 2024–2026 govinfo sample and 757 distinct state appellate opinions from the courts’ own files, 2025–2026 (FED and STATE, H.1); we counted on Oct. 13, 2026.

A count tallies strings, not meanings: it is not the share of a word’s uses that courts shorten, which we have not measured. Our extractor finds names by pattern, so it can miss one, take in stray words and count a name each time it is cited. The opinions are a sample, not a census; one state opinion carries a feed date of Oct. 20, 2026, after the count date, and we kept it rather than change the totals.