Documentation · Bulk data

Plain-text names

names.txt lists every distinct name and alias in a collection, one per line, sorted. It is the simplest file we publish and plugs straight into tools that take a list of search terms.

The bulk files are free to download, with no account. Non-commercial use is covered by our data licence; commercial use needs a licence. To check names one at a time instead, use the screening API.

What it is for

  • Batch text search. Document review and e-discovery tools that accept a list of search terms can take the file as is, to flag documents that mention a listed name.
  • Command-line checks. grep can search a file for any of the names at once: grep -F -i -w -f names.txt mydocument.txt.
  • First-pass filtering. Build a fast lookup or pattern from the names, then send the hits to the matching API or check them in the JSON files.
# which lines of a customer list mention a sanctioned name (exact, case-insensitive, whole words)
curl -sO "$BASE/downloads/collections/sanctions/names.txt"   # BASE: see Keeping data fresh
grep -F -i -w -f names.txt customers.txt

Format

  • UTF-8 text, one name per line, sorted, each name once.
  • Names come from the name and alias properties of every record.
  • A published value holding line breaks is split into one line per part.
  • Values that are scraped web-page markup rather than a name are left out.
CollectionLinesSize
default/names.txt——
sanctions/names.txt——
peps/names.txt——
crime/names.txt——
maritime/names.txt——

Limitations

The file holds names only: no ids, dates, countries or registers, so a hit cannot be traced back to a record from this file alone. Short and common names will also produce many false hits. To confirm a hit, look it up in targets.simple.csv or the JSON files, or search for it.

Names are as the publishers wrote them, in their own scripts; we do not add transliterations yet, so a Latin-script search will not find a name published only in Cyrillic or Arabic.

Last updated 2026-10-03