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In science, a common name is any name by which a species or other concept is known that is not the official scientific name.
Biological common names
A common name, widely defined, of a biological species is any name for it other than its scientific name, i.e., its binomial. A binomial is a formal name and is the same the world over, independent of the language in use: a binomial is rendered italicised in Roman script. There are many common names, but the common names of organisms are part of each and every language and are written in the script for that language. There is no requirement for common names to correspond in any way to scientific names.
Many of our everyday names for plants and animals like "rat", "squirrel", "rose" or "oak" refer to broad categories. By adding adjectival descriptors, such as with "brown rat", "red squirrel", "dog rose" and "cork oak", common names for individual species may arise.
Such a common name referring to a category can be quite useful in local context while ambiguous if used more widely. Names like "sardine" or "deer" can apply to dozens of different species worldwide, though those names are perfectly adequate in their original domains of use, (fishing and hunting), in localities where only one such species is known to exist or is likely to be caught.
Vernacular names
Vernacular names may loosely be described as common names in local languages or dialects. In a country that, beside the official language, has many local languages (Indonesia, Australia, etc) there can be a bewildering amount of vernacular names. In earlier times it has been attempted to dutifully record these, but these days it is usually regarded as hopeless. It requires both knowledge of the language involved and of the taxa involved: therefore it is very time-consuming to achieve any degree of accuracy.
Official common names
For some groups, such as birds in the US, individual species have official common names. Such official common names are chosen by a governing body and typically attempt to follow a set of guidelines set by that body. Such names have no standing in scientific nomenclature. They are attempts by scientists to communicate with non-scientists who might feel intimidated by scientific names, or by non-scientists trying to create more pleasant-sounding names.
It is debatable how far official common names are actually "common". Much depends on how the methods of composing the list. In the past there has been a fad to have all the species in a genus repeat the genus name, for example if Diospyros is regarded as the "ebony genus", to have all the species include "ebony" in the name. Such a method of creating names is highly artificial and is frowned upon. However, if an official list respects widely used layperson's names it may be beneficial.
Botanists sometimes maintain official common names for plants, although this will vary greatly. Informally, botanists generally do not capitalize any common names; this can be seen as a sign of "professionalism" since the uninitiated may have difficulty in interpreting names such as "the hairy brome" for localities where "the Hairy Brome (Bromus ramosus) is not the only member of the genus.
Other attempts to standardise common names (insects in New Zealand; freshwater fishes in north America) have met with mixed success, but common names lose some of their unique merits when defined. Undefined use of Māori names for plants in New Zealand has usefully added stability to nomenclature in the face of scientific name changes.
Common names that repeat scientific names
Common names and scientific names have different functions, but can be closely related. In gardening, a fashion leader, familiar names like Begonia, Dahlia, Gladiolus, and Rhododendron are common names that usually refer to plants in a genus of the same name (but note that Azalea refers to a genus now submerged in the genus Rhododendron). The use of genus names has been increasing in the vernacular of English-speaking gardeners in recent decades. Gardeners, naturalists and others, typically continue to use old common names when a scientific name changes. This is a useful feature whereby common names lend a measure of stability to nomenclature and retain historical associations. For this reason common and scientific names should be treated differently with no systematic attempt to make them correspond.
Especially with plants, common names (unitalicised) are often the same as their genus (scientific) names (italicised and capitalised). However, the reverse also happens, some pre-existing common names, typically from languages local to the plants, have been used to create the formal binomial. For this, the common names can be Latinized (and possibly anglicized), irrespective of their source language. For example Hoheria is from the New Zealand Māori "Houhere". A local name may also be adopted unaltered: the genus Tsuga is so named after the Japanese "tsugá".
For historical reasons, some common names and 'equivalent' scientific names refer to unrelated species. For example Cranesbill is the common name for the genus Geranium, while the common name Geranium refers to species of the South African genus Pelargonium. Again, the gardeners' 'Nasturtium' is Tropaeolum spec., whereas the European Watercress is in the genus Nasturtium.
New common names are to be welcomed as long as they are helpful to a group of users, no matter how small. Since the function of the names is useful communication within user communities, spontaneous names are ideal. This has always been recognised, but computerization and the Web, by facilitating linkages to the single scientific name for each taxon, makes the flexibility of multi-lingual and multiple local common names an increasingly valuable feature.
Chemical common names
In chemistry, the IUPAC nomenclature, a convention on systematic names, a common name is a name from which a structural formula can be drawn, that doesn't follow the systematic naming procedure.
References
The use of common names
"Common name"