Nomenclature Codes - Common Names

Common Names

Many plants and animals also have common and familiar names in the countries where they occur. In the case of plants, and even animals, the same common name is often applied to several different organisms within one country: a periwinkle can be a flowering plant or one of several kinds of intertidal snail. In the case of some animals especially birds, there is much greater uniformity in the use of common names, which generally refer to only a single species (although they are generally inclusive of subspecies).

In some case the scientific genus name has become the common name, for example, Hydra and Daphnia. The use of English common names is governed by the normal rules of grammar in English, and they are pluralised according to the same rules. Even though common names may appear to have roots in other languages, especially Latin or Greek, plurals of common names do not follow the grammatical rules of those languages. For example it is correct to refer to many hydras or many octopuses. However, when using the scientific binomial name or any other rank of the taxonomy, plurals are ordinarily not used at all.