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In science, a 'common name' is any name by which a species or other concept is known that is not the official scientific name.

Contents

Biological common names

Official common names

Common names that repeat scientific names

Chemical common names

References

Biological common names

A common name, widely defined, of a biological species is any name for it other than its scientific name, i.e., its binomial. A binomial is a formal name and is the same the world over, independent of the language in use: a binomial is rendered italicised in Roman script. There are many common names, but the common names of organisms are part of each and every language and are written in the script for that language. There is no requirement for common names to correspond in any way to scientific names.
Many of our everyday names for plants and animals like "rat", "squirrel", "rose" or "oak" refer to broad categories. By adding adjectival descriptors, such as with "brown rat", "red squirrel", "dog rose" and "cork oak", common names for individual species may arise.
Such a common name referring to a category can be quite useful in local context, while ambiguous if used more widely. Names like "sardine" or "deer" can apply to dozens of different species worldwide, though those names are perfectly adequate in their original domains of use, (fishing and hunting), in localities where only one such species is known to exist or is likely to be caught.

Official common names

For some groups, such as birds in the US, individual species have 'official common names'. Such official common names are chosen by a governing body and typically attempt to follow a set of guidelines set by that body. Such names have no standing in scientific nomenclature. They are attempts by scientists to communicate with non-scientists who might feel intimidated by scientific names, or by non-scientists trying to create more pleasant-sounding names.
It is debatable how far official common names are actually "common". Much depends on how the methods of composing the list. In the past there has been a fad to have all the species in a genus repeat the genus name, for example if ''Diospyros'' is regarded as the "ebony genus", to have all the species include "ebony" in the name. Such a method of creating names is highly artificial and is frowned upon. However, if an official list respects widely used layperson's names it may be beneficial.
Other attempts to standardise common names (insects in New Zealand; freshwater fishes in north America) have met with mixed success, but common names lose some of their unique merits when defined. Undefined use of Māori names for plants in New Zealand has usefully added stability to nomenclature in the face of scientific name changes.
In Australia, Common names for commercial seafood species have been standardised as the Australian Fish Names Standard by Seafood Services Australia (SSA) since 2001. SSA was accredited by Standards Australia, Australia’s peak non-government standards development organisation. [1] Previously many fish were sold under a large number of common names in Australia. Other fish names are kept by CSIRO's Fish Names Database. [2]

Common names that repeat scientific names

Common names and scientific names have different functions, but can be closely related. In gardening, familiar names like Begonia, Dahlia, Gladiolus, and Rhododendron are common names that usually refer to plants in a genus of the same name (but note that Azalea refers to a genus now submerged in the genus ''Rhododendron''). The use of genus names has been increasing in the vernacular of English-speaking gardeners in recent decades. Gardeners, naturalists and others, typically continue to use old common names when a scientific name changes. This is a useful feature whereby common names lend a measure of stability to nomenclature and retain historical associations.
Especially with plants, common names (unitalicised) are often the same as their(scientific) names (italicised and capitalised). However, the reverse also happens, some pre-existing common names, typically from languages local to the plants, have been used to create the formal binomial. For this, the common names can be Latinized (and possibly anglicized), irrespective of their source language. For example ''Hoheria'' is from the New Zealand Māori "Houhere". A local name may also be adopted unaltered: the genus ''Tsuga'' is so named after the Japanese "tsugá".
For historical reasons, some common names and 'equivalent' scientific names refer to unrelated species. For example Cranesbill is the common name for the genus ''Geranium'', while the common name Geranium refers to species of the South African genus ''Pelargonium''. Again, the gardeners' 'Nasturtium' is ''Tropaeolum'' spec., whereas the European Watercress is in the genus ''Nasturtium''.
New common names are to be welcomed as long as they are helpful to a group of users, no matter how small. Since the function of the names is useful communication within user communities, spontaneous names are ideal. This has always been recognised, but computerization and the Web, by facilitating linkages to the single scientific name for each taxon, makes the flexibility of multi-lingual and multiple local common names an increasingly valuable feature.

Chemical common names

In chemistry, official naming of chemical substances follows the IUPAC nomenclature, a convention on systematic names. In addition to its systematic name, a chemical may have one or more common or trivial names (and many widely occurring chemicals do indeed have a common name). Some common names allow a reader with some chemical knowledge to deduce the structure of the compound (''e.g.'', acetic acid, a common name for ethanoic acid). Other common names, while uniquely identifying the compound, do not allow the reader to deduce the structure, unless he or she already knows it. Examples include cinnamaldehyde or morphine.

References

★ The use of common names

★ Chemical Names of Common Substances