How Plants Get Scientific Names: A Botanist’s Guide 2026

Plants get scientific names the way any formal label gets assigned in science: someone studies the plant closely, works out where it belongs, writes down a description other botanists can check, and publishes that description in a recognised journal. Only after publication does the name become available for the rest of the world to use. The name itself is always a two-part label built from a genus and a specific epithet, and it follows rules set internationally so that one plant has one name across every language.

Below is the whole process, from the bush in the field to the accepted entry in a database, plus how to read the name, check whether it is still current, and why it may change. If you write up traditional plant knowledge, source herbal material, or simply want to stop guessing which species a label refers to, this is the part worth reading twice.

How Plants Get Scientific Names in Practice

For a plant nobody has named before, the sequence runs like this. A botanist finds it in the field, collects material, and lodges a specimen in a herbarium. That specimen becomes the physical reference everyone else will compare against.

The material is then compared with everything already described and stored under those existing names. If it matches one, it simply joins that species. If it does not fit anything, the botanist concludes it is new to science and writes a name for it, choosing a genus based on its relatives and a specific epithet based on a feature, a place, or a person.

Then comes the part most people never hear about. The botanist writes a full description, prepares an illustration, and publishes the whole thing in a qualifying botanical publication, usually a peer-reviewed journal. That published description, the protologue, is the moment of birth. Until it appears in print or in an acceptable electronic form, the name does not exist.

For a plant that is already known, the process is shorter but not trivial. Someone identifies it, records it properly, and the name attaches to the identification rather than to the label. A plant name is not a label someone invented for a single specimen.

Documentation is the thread running through every stage. In ethnobotanical fieldwork this matters more than most people expect, because a traditional use recorded against an unidentified plant is a use nobody can verify later.

Who Decides How Plants Get Scientific Names?

Nobody sits in a room and assigns names by committee decision. Authority is distributed across several roles, and each one has a defined job.

• The plant collector gathers material in the field and records where, when and under what conditions it grew.
• The identifier compares that material against herbarium collections and published descriptions and says which species it is.
• The taxonomist studies the structure and relationships of the plant, decides which genus it belongs to, and drafts the description of a new taxon.
• The naming author is the person whose name is attached to the taxon as the authority citation, often abbreviated, such as L. for Linnaeus.
• The nomenclatural editor checks the manuscript against the rules of the International Code of Nomenclature before publication.
• The publishing authority, usually a peer-reviewed journal or a recognised monograph series, is the venue that makes the name available.

Regional and international nomenclatural committees handle disputed cases, such as proposals to conserve or reject particular names. The broader taxonomic community then adopts names through reference works and databases, and those become the working consensus.

That division of labour is the reason a scientific name is a formal published name rather than an opinion held by one person about one specimen.

What Are the Parts of a Plant Scientific Name?

A full botanical name can carry six pieces of information. Most readers only need the first two, but the rest is where precision lives.

• Genus name: a single Latinised word, always capitalised, naming a group of closely related species. Sutherlandia contains several closely related species.
• Specific epithet: the second word, always lowercase, which distinguishes one species from its relatives within the genus. It is a word, not a name on its own.
• Species name: the two combined, written as Sutherlandia frutescens. This is the unit that databases of medicinal plants index by.
• Infraspecific ranks: added when a population is recognisably different. Sutherlandia frutescens subsp. frutescens carries the abbreviation, and the subgenus, if used, sits in parentheses between genus and epithet.
• Authority citation: the naming author, in roman type, not italics. Commiphora africana (L.) A.Rich. tells you Linnaeus described it under a different genus and that Richard reclassified it.
• Reference to the protologue: the exact place the name was published, which is what settles any dispute about what the name applies to.

A note on meaning, since it is the part people find most useful. The specific epithet usually signals something real about the plant. Artemisia afra carries a geographic epithet, African wormwood. Pelargonium sidoides carries an epithet referring to its dark-centred, almost black heart-shaped leaves. Sansevieria trifasciata carries a descriptive epithet meaning three-banded.

How to remember Latin plant names

Learners tend to treat Latin plant names as vocabulary to memorise, which is the slow way. A few habits make them stick.

1. Sort by ending. The suffix -oides means resembles, so Pelargonium sidoides reads as resembling something already named.
2. Learn in families of one. If you know -ensis means from a place, then africana, aethiopicus and caffer all land in the same mental drawer.
3. Group by genus. Learn Aloe species together, then Vernonia species together. A genus is a real group of real plants, and grouping sticks better than a flat list.
4. Attach meaning to the plant. Three-banded sansevieria is genuinely three-banded. The link between word and specimen does the remembering for you.
5. Learn the growth form with the name. frutescens means shrubby. Once you know that word, every plant carrying it is recognisable as a woody shrub.
6. Say it out loud. Botanical Latin is pronounceable once you accept that c is always hard and v is always soft.

Abbreviation and rank references come up constantly in older literature, so it is worth knowing the short forms.

Abbreviation	Meaning	Example
sp.	One unidentified or unspecified species of the genus	Aloe sp.
spp.	Several species of the genus	Vernonia spp.
sp. nov.	A species newly described, formally not yet validly published	Genus species sp. nov.
subsp.	Subspecies, a rank below species	Sutherlandia frutescens subsp. frutescens
var.	Variety, a formally recognised botanical variety	Senecio vulgaris var. vulgaris
f.	Form, a smaller infraspecific difference	Genus species f. alba
cv.	Cultivar, a horticulturally selected and named plant	Genus species cv. Name
×	Hybrid, placed between the names of the two parent species	Genus × Genus

How Does the Binomial Naming System Work?

Binomial nomenclature means each species carries exactly two words: the genus, capitalised, and the specific epithet, lowercase. Both are italicised, and the whole pair is treated as one name. Written out fully, Commiphora africana names one species; neither half does that job alone.

The system replaced the polynomial descriptions used before the eighteenth century, where a plant might be listed as a full descriptive phrase. Carl Linnaeus made the two-part form work at scale in Species Plantarum in 1753, and that date still marks the formal starting point for plant nomenclature.

The formatting rules are short enough to learn in a minute.

• Italicise the genus and specific epithet. The authority citation stays in roman type.
• Capitalise the genus, lowercase the specific epithet, always.
• Abbreviate the genus after first use: Commiphora africana, then C. africana.
• Put rank abbreviations in roman type, before the word they qualify.
• Set cultivar names in single quotation marks, never italicised and never in a language other than the language of the country where the cultivar was raised.
• Give the naming author in full on first citation, then abbreviate consistently.

Those ranks sit inside a hierarchy that works from the bottom up, and each level tells you something different.

Rank	Example	What it tells you
Kingdom	Plantae	The broad division between plants and other organisms
Division	Tracheophyta	Vascular plants, with conducting tissue
Class	Liliopsida	Monocotyledons
Order	Fabales	Related families grouped together
Family	Fabaceae	Pea family, which contains many medicinal plants
Genus	Sutherlandia	A group of related species
Species	Sutherlandia frutescens	One identifiable plant kind, the unit names attach to

Why Are Botanical Names Written in Latin?

Botanical names are treated grammatically as Latin, and they are usually built from Latin or Latinised Greek roots. That is a simplification worth correcting: many epithets are not Latin words at all, but Latinised forms of a place name, a person’s surname, or an older vernacular word. The treatment is what matters, not the origin.

Three practical reasons sit behind that choice. A single grammar removes language disputes, since a botanist in Nairobi and one in Lisbon can read the same string without translation. A neutral language removes national bias, since a name cannot belong to one country’s tradition over another’s. And a language no longer spoken everyday cannot drift out of grammatical alignment with the code.

The epithet also carries the reason a name was coined. Four patterns cover most cases.

Type	What it records	Example
Descriptive	A visible feature of the plant	trifasciata, three-banded
Geographic	Where it was found	africana, aethiopicus
Commemorative	A person, often the collector or patron	gordonii, after James Gordon
Functional or habitat	Growth form, habitat, or an association	frutescens, shrubby

This matters for anyone working with traditional plant knowledge. Once an epithet tells you the plant is shrubby, or found at a particular altitude, or named for the person who first brought it to notice, you have a first clue about whether the identification is even plausible. Forum regulars on iNaturalist and r/botany keep saying the same thing: the meaning of the epithet is the part that stays useful in the field.

What Happens During the Formal Naming Process?

New names are made under rules, not taste. Here is the sequence a description actually follows.

How plants get scientific names, step by step

1. Field collection and documentation. The plant is collected with locality, date, habitat, and collector recorded, and a voucher specimen is deposited in a recognised herbarium.
2. Morphological examination. Diagnostic characters are studied, usually under magnification, and compared against herbarium material, type specimens and existing descriptions.
3. Deciding new or known. If nothing matches, the material is judged a new taxon. This decision is the most contested part of the work and the hardest to review later.
4. Comparison with type material. The author checks the original type of every related species. Skipping this is the commonest reason a new name is later found to be superfluous.
5. Choosing the epithet. A name is coined in Latin or English, kept as short as possible, and checked against the index of rejected and conserved names.
6. Preparing nomenclature and description. The Latin name list is drawn up alongside the morphological description, an illustration is prepared, and the type is designated with its repository and details.
7. Publication. The work appears in a qualifying botanical publication with full nomenclatural information. That publication date is the date the name becomes available.

After publication the name can still be conserved or rejected by formal proposal, but from that point on other botanists are entitled to use it. That is the moment the process moves from one person’s work to everyone’s vocabulary.

Which Rules Govern Plant Names?

Plant names are governed by the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants, shortened to the ICN. It is adopted by the International Botanical Congress, which meets on a regular cycle, and the current edition was ratified in Madrid in 2017 and published as the Shenzhen Code in 2018. Fungal names have their own committee for practical reasons; animal names fall under a separate code entirely.

Four ideas carry most of the weight.

• Effective publication. A name must be published in a way the Code accepts. Without that, it does not exist.
• Legitimacy. A name must be formed according to the rules of construction. Rules of priority govern which of two legitimate names is correct; legitimacy governs whether a name was well formed.
• Priority. The earliest legitimately published name for a taxon is the correct one, unless a conserved name is protected against an older competitor.
• Typification. Every name is tied to a single type specimen, which becomes the permanent reference point for what the name means.

The Code also fixes the details that cause endless arguments: tautonyms are forbidden for plants but allowed for animals, and the rules for homonyms are explicit. If the same name is validly published for two different taxa, the later one is a homonym and cannot be used; where one name is a later synonym and the other is illegitimate for the same reason, that is a hemihomonym.

The Code says nothing about whether a plant is useful, harmless, or valuable. Those are questions of pharmacology and ethnobotany, and they are answered with evidence outside the Code.

How Do Scientists Decide That a Name Is Correct?

Identification and nomenclature are separate acts, and confusing them causes most of the disagreement you see online. Identification is a taxonomist’s conclusion about which species a specimen belongs to. Nomenclature is the status of the name itself under the Code.

The evidence chain usually runs like this. The specimen is compared against descriptions, against type material where available, and against authenticated reference specimens held in herbaria. Diagnostic characters are checked directly rather than inferred from a photograph. Where morphology is ambiguous, molecular data from DNA barcoding and phylogenetics now often settle the placement.

Review follows. Journal referees and editors check that the description is adequate, that the comparison with related taxa is honest, and that the nomenclatural elements satisfy the Code. Editors of major monographs and floristic works then test names against regional usage before adopting them.

So there are two separate judgments in play. A plant can carry a perfectly validly published name that a specialist no longer considers correct for that material, which is a taxonomic disagreement rather than a nomenclatural failure. And a specimen can carry an identification that is widely accepted while the name used for it has been superseded.

When people ask who has the final say, the honest answer is that nobody does permanently. The Code settles legal questions about names. Taxonomic opinion settles placement, and that opinion can change with better evidence.

Why Can a Plant Scientific Name Change?

Names change because the evidence changes, and because earlier names surface. The main triggers are these.

• Phylogenetic reclassification. DNA evidence has shown that genera thought to be related are not, so they get split. South African sweet thorn, long written Acacia karroo, now sits in Vachellia karroo in most current references, while Acacia sensu stricto continues for the Australian species.
• Lumping. Several small genera are merged into one, and the older, legitimate name takes precedence.
• An earlier name discovered. A long-lost publication turns up, and its name has priority.
• Mistaken identifications. What was recorded as one species turns out to be two, or the reverse.
• Correction of Latin. An epithet spelled in a way the Code does not allow gets corrected, so the name changes in form.

Old names rarely disappear. They stay in herbaria, in field guides, in theses and in pharmacopoeias as synonyms, which is why two equally careful sources can print different names for the same plant.

That is not only an academic nuisance. If someone harvests material using a name that now refers to a different species, the record becomes untraceable, and a safety question turns into an unanswerable one. Whenever you read a traditional use recorded under a scientific name, check whether that name is still the accepted one before treating the record as current.

How Can You Find the Accepted Name of a Plant?

Start with a name-checking database, not a general web search. Four cover most of the world’s plant names.

• Plants of the World Online at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, is the reference most people in plant forums treat as the tie-breaker when sources disagree.
• World Flora Online maintains a consolidated list of plant names with synonymy.
• GBIF records occurrences, specimens and taxon links across biodiversity projects worldwide.
• Catalogue of Life provides an annual checklist assembled from multiple contributing databases.

A workable routine takes five minutes. Look up the name in the database and note which name is listed as accepted. Then follow the synonymy list to see every other name that has been applied to that taxon. Record the database you used and the date you checked, because the answer will change. If the name is one you found in old literature, expect the accepted name to differ and trace it before you cite it.

Two habits keep you out of trouble. Never assume a common name resolves to a single species, because vernacular names routinely cover several, sometimes in different regions. And never treat a name that looks Latin as verified, since coined names circulate in trade literature long before anyone publishes them properly.

Frequently Asked Questions

Conclusion

A scientific name is the last step in a process, not the first. It arrives after field collection, documentation, comparison with existing material, a written description, and publication in a qualifying journal under the International Code of Nomenclature. That chain is why the name is dependable: anyone can check it against the same specimens and the same publication.

If you are starting out, take one plant you already know and trace it properly. Find the accepted name in Plants of the World Online, read the synonymy list, look up what the epithet means, and check that the authority citation matches a real publication. Once you have done that for one plant, the rest of the system is much easier to read.