Englishgeneral partnershipunlimited liability

What is “GP”?

GP stands for General Partnership, a general partnership used primarily in Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland. The suffix signals that the business has unlimited liability and is privately held.

Full meaning & translation

The full form is General Partnership. It translates literally as “General partnership.” You may also encounter it abbreviated or written as general p ship, general partnership, general partnership limited, general partnership ltd.

Where it's used

GP appears in company names registered in the following 6 jurisdictions:

CA · CanadaGB · United KingdomIE · IrelandKH · CambodiaRU · RussiaUS · United States

What it tells you about the company

LiabilityMembers have unlimited personal liability for the entity's obligations.
OwnershipPrivately held. Shares are not listed or traded on a public exchange.
ComparableBroadly equivalent to GBHOH in Germany, GBR in Germany, OHG in Germany.

Equivalent forms around the world

These are the closest structural equivalents to GP in other jurisdictions — same entity category, different national law.

CountryEquivalent suffix
GermanyGBHOH
GermanyGBR
GermanyOHG
GermanyPG
CanadaSCC
FranceSCI
FranceSNC
CanadaULDT

Normalizing “GP” in your data

When matching or deduplicating company records, the legal suffix is noise — Acme GP” and “Acme” should resolve to the same entity. One API call strips it and returns a stable canonical form:

Request
curl -X POST https://api.ambect.com/v1/normalize/company \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $AMBECT_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"name": "Acme GP", "country": "ca"}'
Response
{
  "data": {
    "canonical": "acme gp",
    "legal_type": null,
    "tokens": [
      "acme",
      "gp"
    ]
  },
  "meta": {
    "pipeline": [
      "lowercase",
      "legal_suffix"
    ],
    "confidence": 0.99
  }
}

Frequently asked questions

What does GP stand for?

GP stands for General Partnership, which translates as "General partnership".

Is a GP public or private?

A GP is a private entity — its shares are not publicly listed or traded on a stock exchange.

What is the liability in a GP?

Members of a GP have unlimited personal liability — they can be held responsible for the entity's debts beyond their initial investment.

Which countries use GP?

GP is used in Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Cambodia and 2 other countries.

Need to normalize GP at scale? The Ambect API handles it across 100+ countries in under 5 ms.

Try the live normalizer free →