What’s in a Name?

Mar 15, 2012

By Steve Blight

Over the years, a number of people have asked me about names of plants and animals – why are they complicated and hard to pronounce, what do they mean, and really, who cares? In today’s column I’ll try to shed a bit of light on this subject.

Why are Latin names used? It is important to recall that when nature study really took off in Europe during the period known as the “Age of Enlightenment”, Latin was the common language of the educated – the “lingua franca” of the day. Thus the use of Latin allowed scientists from across Europe to understand each other. Modern biological classification has its roots – so to speak – in the work of Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish scientist who grouped species according to shared physical characteristics. He published the first version of “Systema Naturae” in 1735, in Latin, and thus began the modern system of ordering and naming living things that we still use today.

Interestingly, Linnaeus originally saw the world as being made up of three kingdoms – animals, plants and minerals. People might see traces of this original system in the first question often asked when playing the game “20 questions” – is it animal, vegetable or mineral? The rules have evolved a great deal over the years, and scientists now rely more on evolutionary relationships than physical characteristics to organize species, but the tradition of using Latin to assigning names to living things remains.

Let’s look at an example to illustrate how the classification system works. We’ll use a small but striking orange and black songbird that flies through our area as it migrates to and from the boreal forest, the Blackburnian Warbler – Dendroica fusca.

It’s clearly an animal, so it belongs in the kingdom “Animalia” along with about 1 million other known species.

It has a backbone and spinal cord, so it is in the phylum “Chordata” with about 40,000 species.

It is a bird, so it falls into the class “Aves” with about 8600 species.

It is in the order “Passiformes” with 5160 other species of songbird.

It’s in the family of “Parulidae”, or New World warblers, along with 124 other warblers.

It is one or 28 warblers in the genus Dendroica.

Finally, it has its own unique name Dendroica fusca that identifies it as a Blackburnian Warbler. By convention, the genus and species are normally written in italics, with the first letter of the genus capitalized. And as a general rule only the genus and species are used as the name of a species.

Some people find the handy phrase “King Paul Came On Fancy Green Skates” helps them remember the correct order for the main classification groupings for animals – K for kingdom, P for phylum, C for class, O for order, F for family, G for genus and S for species.

One reason for using scientific names is that every species has only one unique Latin name. Many plants and animals have a number of common names, and some common names are used for more than one species. Using the Latin name clears up much confusion – one name, one species, end of discussion.

As a final point, why does the work of sorting out and naming species matter? For one thing, the detailed work of sorting out relationships between living things helps people better understand the diversity of life on earth. This information is increasingly being used to help decide where best to focus urgent conservation efforts and scarce dollars around the world. Linneaus would be happy that it all starts with a name.

Please feel free to report any observations to Lorraine Julien at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.  or Steve Blight at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.