| nonproprietary name | A short name (often called a generic name) of a chemical, drug, or other substance that is not subject to trademark (proprietary) rights but is, in contrast to a trivial name, recognised or recommended by government agencies (e.g., Federal Food and Drug Administration) and by quasi-official organizations (e.g., U.S. Adopted Names Council) for general public use. Like a proprietary name, it is almost always a coined designation derived without using set criteria. Compare: trivial name, proprietary name, semisystematic name, systematic name. (05 Mar 2000) |
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| systematic name | As applied to chemical substances, a systematic name is composed of specially coined or selected words or syllables, each of which has a precisely defined chemical structural meaning, so that the structure may be derived from the name. Water (trivial name) is hydrogen oxide (systematic). The systematic name of histamine (a semisystematic name) is imidazolethylamine, which indicates that a radical of imidazole replaces one hydrogen atom of ethylamine, which in turn is an ethyl group attached to an amine group. Dimethyl sulfoxide states that two methyl radicals are attached to a sulfur atom that holds an oxygen atom. Carbolic acid (trivial name) or phenol (semisystematic name) are, systematically, phenyl hydroxide or hydroxybenzene. See: semisystematic name. (05 Mar 2000) |
| trade name product | <pharmacology> Trademarked proprietary preparations containing the generic substance. Some foreign trade name products have been selectively included here due to the relative popularity of the generic medication. (17 Mar 1998) |
| trivial name | A name of a chemical, no part of which is necessarily used in a systematic sense; i.e., it gives little or no indication as to chemical structure. Such names are common for drugs, hormones, proteins, and other biologicals, and are used by the general public. They may not be officially sanctioned, in contrast to nonproprietary names, but may be adopted as official nonproprietary names as a result of widespread usage. Examples are water, aspirin, chlorophyll, haem, methotrexate, folic acid, caffeine, thyroxine, epinephrine, barbital, etc.; also common abbreviations for chemically defined substances, such as ACTH, MSH, BAL, DDT, which are spoken as such and not in terms of the words they represent. The distinction between trivial and semitrivial names is seldom made; thus tetrahydrofolate, methylglycine, glucosamine, etc., are often termed trivial even though each contains a systematic part that is used in the correct systematic sense (tetrahydro for four hydrogen atoms, methyl for a -CH3 group, amine for -NH2 in the above). Trivial names are often assigned arbitrarily to chemical compounds, especially from natural sources, before the chemical structures, hence systematic names can be assigned; also, they afford useful shortenings of long systematic names even when these can be stated (although most such shortenings turn out to be semisystematic, as they incorporate some portion of the systematic name). (05 Mar 2000) |