Scientific names, said and explained

Name Decoder

Scientific names look intimidating, but most of them are little descriptions in Latin and Greek: Agkistrodon piscivorus is the “hook-toothed fish-eater.” Type any reptile or amphibian name you have run into, scientific or common, and hear how it is said, what each part means, and who or what it honors. Every meaning says whether it has been checked against a published source yet.

How to say any scientific name
  1. There’s no single right way. As the botanist William Stearn put it, “a simple and consistent method of pronouncing them does not exist.” If people understand you, you said it well.
  2. Say every vowel. Scientific names have almost no silent letters, and a final -e is said “ee”: Siren (SY-ren) , Terrapene (teh-RAP-uh-nee) .
  3. Where the stress goes. With two syllables, stress the first (Hyla (HY-luh) ). In longer names, stress the next-to-last syllable when its vowel is “long”, otherwise the one before it (Crotalus (KRAH-tuh-lus) ). Endings that are usually long: -atus, -alis, -inus, -osus, and -urus, “tail” (Sistrurus (sis-TROO-rus) ). The ending -ensis, “from” a place, always takes the stress (carolinensis (ka-roh-lih-NEN-sis) ). Because Latin vowel lengths aren’t written in scientific names, the stress can’t always be predicted from the spelling, which is one reason you’ll hear differences.
  4. Soft and hard letters. c and g are soft (s, j) before e, i, y, ae and oe, and hard everywhere else: Cemophora (seh-MAH-foh-ruh) but Coluber (KAH-loo-ber) . ch sounds like k (Chelydra (keh-LY-druh) ), ph like f, and the first letter of ps-, pt- and ct- is silent (Pseudacris (soo-DAY-kris) ).
  5. Common endings. ae and oe say “ee”; a final -i says “eye”, -ii says “ee-eye”, and -ae says “ee”.
  6. Names that honor people keep the person’s own name. Stearn’s advice was to say them “as nearly as possible like the original name but with a Latin ending”: holbrookii (HOHL-brook-ee-eye) honors John Edwards Holbrook.
  7. Two traditions. The rules above are the traditional English way of reading Latin, still widely used in biology. Some people prefer classical Latin, the way Romans said it (c always hard, v like w, ae like “eye”). Each name’s card shows both where they differ.
Sources
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Where this comes from. Our list of names is the Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles’ Scientific and Standard English Names (9th ed., 2025) for the United States, and SSAR is the list we follow. Meanings are our reading of the Latin and Greek; each one says whether it has been checked word for word against a published source (so far the Louisiana species, against the Reptile Database and cited Wikipedia entries), and the rest are being checked region by region. Names outside the list get an automatic, clearly labeled guess.

Old names, other languages, and species worldwide come from ITIS, the Integrated Taxonomic Information System run by a partnership of U.S. federal agencies: 19,481 reptile and amphibian species, 23,131 earlier names, and common names in English, Spanish and French. Where ITIS and SSAR differ, the card says so. Retrieved September 28, 2026, from the Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS) on-line database, www.itis.gov, CC0, https://doi.org/10.5066/F7KH0KBK.

The voice is computer-generated (Piper text-to-speech, with a voice trained on the public-domain LJ Speech recordings), following the respelling you see. If a name sounds wrong to you, use “Something wrong?” on its card.

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