What is “Ltd”?

Full meaning & translation

The full form is Public Limited Company. It translates literally as “Company with limited liability.” You may also encounter it abbreviated or written as ak o * ltd, ak oo, ak oo * limited, ak oo * ltd.

Where it's used

Ltd appears in company names registered in the following 47 jurisdictions:

What it tells you about the company

Equivalent forms around the world

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

Normalizing “Ltd” in your data

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

curl -X POST https://api.ambect.com/v1/normalize/company \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $AMBECT_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"name": "Acme Ltd", "country": "ae"}'

{
  "data": {
    "canonical": "acme",
    "legal_type": "ltd",
    "tokens": [
      "acme"
    ]
  },
  "meta": {
    "pipeline": [
      "lowercase",
      "legal_suffix"
    ],
    "confidence": 0.99
  }
}

Compare Ltd with

Frequently asked questions