Hi Waiyin,
Yes, abbreviations are a problem. There are very many of them, and they are not always listed in the Dictionary, nor are they always consistent. More to the point, they are only really relevant in a print context, and—with the exception of well-known, standard abbreviations such as “etc.”, “i.e.” and so on—I would rather spell them all out.
In fact I have already done so to some degree, and have just added “Ep.” to that, so next time the dictionary is updated it will read “epithet” instead. But this reveals the problem, as sometimes “Ep.” also stood for “Epic” as in “Epic Sanskrit”. In addition, the punctuation and syntax is complex; for example, since the abbreviation “Ep.” is capitalized, it does not change when it starts a sentence. So we can’t mechanically replace it with lower-case “epithet”. Of course, we can fix this by simply capitalizing when it follows a period. Except the punctuation is often missing or incorrect. Then again, “ep.” is not always capitalized, so we have to deal with that; and in one instance, it is incorrectly OCR-ed, so we have to correct to “cp.”
So anyway, you get the point. At some time, I would love to go through and spell out all abbreviations (as well as marking up grammatical terms, and giving contemporary references in full and consistent form). But that day is not this day! You can see our plans for the dictionary here: