roger downie

Roger Downie, Froglife and University of Glasgow

In the May 2025 edition of Croaks, Downie (2025) discussed the rules and conventions governing the Latin binomial scientific names for animal species, such as Rana temporaria (the Common Frog) and Bufo bufo (the Common Toad). In brackets, I’ve given versions of the common or Standard English names of these two species. Notice that the Latin names are shown in italics whereas the English names are in normal font. In this short article, I’ll discuss the origins, uses and rules behind common names.

Many common (or vernacular) names for animals and plants arose long before natural historians got down to naming, describing and classifying living organisms. McInerny and Minting (2016) list the Scots and Gaelic names for R. temporaria and B. bufo (box 1). These lists illustrate the diversity and colourfulness of vernacular names given to prominent species of wildlife, often associated with vivid folk tales and superstitions.

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There are occasional confusions and lack of specificity, with ‘paddock’ used for both frogs and toads.

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They also show the occasional confusions and lack of specificity, with ‘paddock’ used for both frogs and toads. Much research (see, for example Diamond [1966] and Altran [1998]) has shown that native peoples all over the world have long been able to distinguish and name species, often in good accordance with the species boundaries later determined by scientists. This is particularly the case where species are important to people, as food items, or for medicines, or clothing, or because the species is a threat.

When researching an article on the common names of Trinidad and Tobago’s frogs (Downie, 2013), I wondered if the Caribbean’s native people had any documented names and found a fascinating list of Arawak natural history words (Forte, 1996), the Arawaks being one of the peoples to have lived in Trinidad in pre-Columbian times. Ten kinds of frogs are listed, mostly with names clearly derived from the sounds of their calls: ‘katakata’ for a small aquatic frog; ‘tontonle’ for a small ground frog;  ‘buraburaro’ for a riverside frog. Some of these names can be linked to species now known to science.

Rather more of the Arawak names for reptiles (43 in total) can be associated with particular species: ‘maholoro’ = boa constrictor; ‘labb-aria’= fer de lance; ‘konoke-se’= bushmaster; ‘kamodo’ =anaconda; ‘duradura’ =alligator. It is probably not surprising that the Arawaks had more words for potentially dangerous reptiles than for harmless frogs.

Vernacular names of the kinds shown above demonstrate the long-standing interest in wildlife shown by peoples all over the world, but they are of limited use in modern writing about species, because of their diversity and frequent lack of specificity. Given that each described species has been assigned a unique Latin name, is there any need for so-called ‘common’ names? One factor is that Latin names are often long, cumbersome and difficult to pronounce and spell. They are also subject to change as a result of taxonomic revisions: one of the species I have researched in Trinidad, now Leptodactylus fuscus, has had 19 different Latin names, beginning with Rana fusca, while a common name, the whistling frog, has remained unchanged. Common names  therefore have value as communication tools.

Where do common names come from? Some derive from ancient names, at least in part: frog, toad, newt and snake are all ancient English words for kinds of animal. To convert them into useful common or Standard English names for particular species, they need extra qualifying words to show which frog, newt or snake is being referred to, such as great crested newt. Frank and Ramus (1995) compiled what they intended as a ‘complete’ list of common names linked to scientific names of all known amphibians and reptiles. For the many mainly tropical species where existing common names in English were lacking, they invented names. ‘Completeness’ is hard to achieve. The number of named amphibian species in 1992, around the time Frank and Ramus were writing, was 4533 (Kohler et al., 2005), whereas the latest figure (Frost, 2025) is 8885, an almost 100% increase. In addition, taxonomic revisions have made some of Frank and Ramus’s families of names obsolete.

A very thoughtful discussion and listing of common names (for Caribbean amphibians and reptiles) is provided by Hedges et al. (2019). They give three principles underlying their choices of common names: 1) Uniqueness– a common name should be unique in the world (as the Latin names are) to avoid overlap and confusion e.g. Green Anole is unhelpful as a name for a single North American species of lizard since there are several species of green-coloured anoles in South America and the Caribbean. 2) Usefulness– a common name, unlike the Latin name in most cases, should provide some useful information about the species. For this reason, they discourage the inclusion of the type locality (i.e. the place from where the species was first collected and named), since this is often misleading over the extent of the range of a species; they also discourage using the name of the scientist who first described or collected the species in the common name, since it provides no information about the species. However, geographic, taxonomic and morphological information is useful, and worth including in the common name. As an example, Sphaerodactylus oxyrhinus Gosse 1850 could be called Gosse’s Gecko, but Hedges et al. prefer Jamaican Sharp-nosed Geckolet as providing both geographic and morphological information. 3) Consistency– this principle covers the grammar and style of names.

Helpfully for this article, the (American) Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles has just published the 9^th edition of its guidelines for the naming of species in Standard English (Nicholson, 2025), the result of a long process of discussion and review. I will not attempt a full summary of this 87-page document, which is of use mainly to scientists writing research papers and journal editors, but do give a few key points. When referring to a particular species, the Standard English name has the initials capitalised, but when not referring to a particular species, lower case is used e.g. ‘I saw a few green-brown frogs in the pond this morning’; when two words are joined, they are linked by a hyphen; when a descriptor refers to a feature of an animal, the suffix -ed is used. These points lead to Great-crested Newt as the correct form, rather than any of the alternatives. In addition, a compound name should be spelled as a single word if a) the second part is any of the words frog, toad, snake etc e.g. Treefrog, not Tree-frog or Tree Frog; b ) the second part refers to a part of the body e.g. Whiptail, not Whip-tail; c) the name describes an activity of the animal e.g. Pondslider.

This article may seem a bit dry and nit-picky, but I hope it is helpful to readers. Using the correct terms for species is important for the development of understanding. Looking back at the first paragraph, I think that the common names used fail the criterion of uniqueness: possibly European common frog, or even Eurasian?

References

Box 1 Common names in Scotland

Species	Scots	Gaelic
Rana temporaria	Paddle-doo, Paddock, Puddock, Paddy	Losgann, Craigean, Leumachan, magan
Bufo bufo	Corby, Gangrell, Paddock, Taid, Yird taid	Muile-mhagach, Bofalan, Logann, Dubh, Leumachan, Magog, Miul-mahag, Much-ruhag