Decode a Scientific Name

Most of the living things we know about have been given a scientific name — a special name, usually in two parts, that scientists around the world can use to mean the same creature or plant. (Millions more species haven’t been discovered or named yet, and experts sometimes still disagree about a name — nature is far bigger than our lists.) A scientific name can look a little mysterious at first, but once you know a few tricks you can start to read one, and even work out what it means. Let’s crack the code.

Why “scientific” and not “Latin”?

You may have heard these called “Latin names”. That is not quite right. The grammar — the way the words are joined together and given their endings — does follow the rules of Latin. But the words themselves come from all over the world and all through history:

  • Latin — like vulpes (fox) or alba (white).
  • Ancient Greek — like pous (foot) or mikros (small).
  • People’s names — a species is often named to honour the person who found it, or a hero. An ending like -ii usually means “named after”, as in darwinii for Charles Darwin.
  • Local and indigenous words — sometimes the name borrows the word used by the people who knew the creature long before scientists came along.
  • Jokes and even anagrams — scientists are human, and now and then they hide a pun, a nod to a favourite film, or a scrambled word inside a name.

Because the words are such a global mix, “scientific name” is a far better description than “Latin name”.

What is a scientific name?

A scientific name usually has two main parts — which is why the system is called binomial, meaning “two names”. Take the red fox: Vulpes vulpes.

  • The first word is the genus — the wider group, or family, the creature belongs to. Vulpes means “the foxes”.
  • The second word is the species (its “specific” name) — the exact kind within that group.

Here’s the clever part: it works like a person’s name, but back to front. Your surname is shared with your whole family; your first name picks you out. A scientific name does the same — but it puts the “family name” (the genus) first. So if you were a species, you wouldn’t be “Sam Jones” — you’d be “Jones sam”.

The history: one name the whole world can share

Three hundred years ago, naming nature was chaos. A single plant might have fifty different local names, and the very same name could mean completely different things in different places.

You can still see the problem today. The British robin (Erithacus rubecula) is the tiny, orange-breasted bird of our gardens. But the American robin (Turdus migratorius) is a big thrush — a completely different bird that homesick settlers simply thought looked a bit like the robin back home. Same name, two very different birds.

A Swedish naturalist named Carl Linnaeus set out to fix this in the 1700s. He gave every living thing a single, tidy, two-word scientific name that scientists in every country could agree on. Now, wherever you are in the world, Erithacus rubecula means one bird, and one bird only.

The golden rules

Writing a scientific name properly is easy once you know the three rules:

  1. 1The genus always starts with a Capital letter.
  2. 2The species is always lower case.
  3. 3Both words are always written in italics (or underlined, if you are writing by hand and cannot do italics).

Panthera leo

Genus
Capital P, italicspecies
lower-case l, italic

…is the lion. 🦁

Fun and famous names

Meles meles

the Badger 🦡

When both words match, it is called a tautonym — a double name. Meles is simply the old Latin for “badger”, so this one just says “badger badger”!

Bellis perennis

the Daisy 🌼

Bellis means “pretty” and perennis means “lasting year after year”. Its English name comes from “day’s eye”, because it opens at dawn and closes at dusk.

Scaptia beyonceae

a horsefly 🪰

In 2011 a scientist named this Australian fly after the singer Beyoncé, thanks to the dazzling golden tuft of hairs on its tail end.

Dracorex hogwartsia

a dinosaur 🦖

This spiky-skulled dinosaur’s name means “dragon king of Hogwarts”, after the school in Harry Potter. Scientists really do have fun.

The Decoder Dictionary

Now you are ready to become a name detective. Many scientific names are built from the same handful of recurring words — little building blocks that turn up again and again. vulgaris means “common”, alba means “white”, pseudo- means “false”. Learn a few, and you can half-translate names you have never met before.

Search the dictionary below, or tap any word to see what it means and which creatures and plants use it.

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