ListMatchGenie

Handling nicknames and abbreviations

Bill/William, NYC/New York City, St/Street, Inc/Incorporated — how ListMatchGenie standardizes these variations so matching still works.

Real-world data is full of stylistic variation that isn't meaningful for matching. Bill and William are the same person. St and Street are the same word. Inc and Incorporated are the same suffix. ListMatchGenie handles these with three specific mechanisms.

Nicknames

Used for first names only. Default: on for Person profile, off elsewhere.

How it works

The engine maintains a canonical-form table mapping nicknames to full names:

  • Bill, Will, Billy → William
  • Beth, Liz, Lizzie → Elizabeth
  • Jenn, Jen, Jenny → Jennifer
  • Bob, Robby, Rob → Robert
  • Jim, Jimmy → James
  • Katie, Kate, Katy → Katherine

When comparing two first names, the engine normalizes both to their canonical form. If they agree, the first-name subscore jumps to 95 — high confidence.

Bidirectional lookup

The table works both directions. Will ↔ William is a match. William ↔ Bill is a match. Bill ↔ Bobby is not a match (different canonical forms).

Initials

A single-letter first name is treated as an initial and matches any first name starting with that letter:

  • J ↔ John: match (score 80)
  • J ↔ James: match (score 80)
  • J. ↔ John: match (period stripped)

Initial matches score lower than nickname matches because the signal is weaker.

Configuration

Nickname matchingtoggleDefault: on for Person

Enable or disable the canonical-form lookup.

Initial matchingtoggleDefault: on for Person

Enable or disable initial-to-full-name matching. Initial matches are lower-confidence; disable if you want strict first-name matching.

Languages

The default table is English. Spanish, French, German, and Italian tables are available and used automatically when the Genie detects the name's origin from the data. Custom tables can be provided per account on Enterprise plans.

Address abbreviations

Used on address, city, and similar fields. Default: on for Person and Company profiles.

How it works

Street-type abbreviations are expanded before comparison:

  • St → Street
  • Ave → Avenue
  • Blvd → Boulevard
  • Dr → Drive
  • Ln → Lane
  • Rd → Road
  • Cir → Circle
  • Pl → Place
  • Pkwy → Parkway

Directional abbreviations:

  • N, S, E, W, NE, etc. → North, South, etc.

Unit designators:

  • Apt → Apartment
  • Ste → Suite
  • Bldg → Building

The comparison runs on expanded forms. Output preserves the original.

City abbreviations

Common city shortenings:

  • NYC → New York City
  • LA → Los Angeles
  • SF → San Francisco
  • DC → Washington
  • Ft → Fort
  • Mt → Mount
  • St → Saint (context-aware; distinguishes from street St)

State / country

State name expansion is automatic:

  • CA ↔ California
  • NY ↔ New York

Full country name / ISO 2-letter code mapping:

  • US ↔ USA ↔ United States
  • UK ↔ GB ↔ United Kingdom

Company suffixes

Used on company name fields. Default: on for Company profile.

How it works

Common legal entity suffixes are normalized (or stripped, depending on configuration):

  • Inc., Inc, Incorporated, incorporated → all equivalent
  • LLC, L.L.C., Limited Liability Company → equivalent
  • Ltd, Ltd., Limited → equivalent
  • Corp, Corporation → equivalent
  • Co, Co., Company → equivalent
  • GmbH, AG, SA, BV → preserved (non-US; carries meaning)

Comparison ignores these when determining the core company name match, but the original suffix is preserved in output.

The The problem

Leading articles (The, La, Le, Der) are stripped for comparison:

  • The Acme Company ↔ Acme Company: match

Trailing articles and mid-string articles are not stripped (too rare and ambiguous).

Ampersand and "and"

& and and are treated as equivalent:

  • Smith & Jones ↔ Smith and Jones: match

Profile-level defaults

Each built-in profile has sensible defaults:

FeatureFreeStarterProBusiness

Override any of these in custom profiles.

Pitfalls

Nickname matching in Company profile

If a company name includes a person's name (Smith & Sons), nickname matching could incorrectly match Smith & Sons with Bill Smith Industries. The Company profile defaults nickname matching off for this reason.

Abbreviations in non-address contexts

Address abbreviations applied to non-address data can cause problems. A "notes" column containing St. Louis University would be expanded to Saint Louis University — usually correct, but if the column was freeform, unintended. Disable abbreviation expansion on notes/description columns.

Cross-lingual nicknames

English nickname tables don't cover every culture. Mikhail and Misha are equivalent in Russian but don't appear in the English table. Use a language-specific custom table for non-English data.