Latin Names

29 Names, Same Plant

In 1753 Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus published Species Plantarum, a book describing some 6,000 plant species that became the foundation of modern plant nomenclature. The list of names has since ballooned to 1.05 million, but of those, only around 300,000 are now confirmed to be unique species. Nearly half a million others, it turns out, are redundant.

The scientific moniker for English oak has 314 synonyms, the common daisy (above) 29, and the giant sequoia 18. Those are just a few identified so far in the Plant List, a working database completed last year by the Missouri Botanical Garden and London’s Kew Gardens after years of vetting.

It’s like people. We have different eye colors, shapes, and sizes, but we’re all people. There’s huge variation within a species.

The Plant List

This landmark international resource is a working list of all land plant species1, fundamental to understanding and documenting plant diversity and effective conservation of plants.

The completion of The Plant List accomplishes Target 1 of the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC), which called for a widely accessible working list of known plant species as a step towards a complete world flora. The Plant List can be accessed by visiting www.theplantlist.org.

The Plant List
www.theplantlist.org

Missouri Botanical Garden – Science and Conservation
http://www.mobot.org/plantscience/default.asp

Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
http://www.kew.org/about-kew/index.htm

Tropicos^®
http://www.tropicos.org/

The Long and Short of It – The Plant List
http://www.mobot.org/theplantlist/downloads/plantlistfactsheet.pdf

Image Gallery
The Plant List Image Gallery

Binomial Nomenclature -- Why use Latin?

Prior to the adoption of the modern binomial system of naming species, those who wrote about animals and plants either used their common names in various languages or adopted more-or-less standardized descriptions. In medieval Europe these descriptions were typically in Latin, which was then the language of science.

Today, binomial nomenclature is a formal system of naming species of living things by giving each a name composed of two parts, both of which use Latin grammatical forms, although they can be based on words from other languages. Such a name is called a binomial name (or scientific name or Latin name).

The first part of the name identifies the genus to which the species belongs; the second part identifies the species within the genus. For example, humans belong to the genus Homo and within this genus to the species Homo sapiens. The introduction of this system of naming species is credited to Linnaeus, effectively beginning with his work Species plantarum in 1753. Linnaeus called his two-part name a trivial name (nomen triviale) as opposed to the much longer names then used.

The application of binomial nomenclature is now governed by various internationally agreed codes of rules, of which the two most important are the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) for animals and the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature (ICBN) for plants.