Word.ws English Dictionary

trivial names

trivial names is the plural of trivial name.

Meaning of trivial name

Noun

trivial name (plural trivial names)

  1. A commonly used, non-systematic name of a chemical compound. Trivial names for many compounds have been in use since long before their exact chemical structures were determined.
    • "Carbolic acid", "isopropyl alcohol", and "nitroglycerine" are trivial names for specific organic compounds that have formal systematic names defined by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. "Saltpetre" and "nitre" are trivial names for the inorganic compounds: sodium nitrate or...
  2. A non-systematic name for a chemical element (see systematic element name).
    • Trivial names for types of elements, such as "heavy metals", "noble metals", and "rare-earth elements" are terms of convenience, and either do not occur as such in the periodic table or do not form strict, coherent groups in the table. Element 137 (systematic name: untriseptium) is called by the...
  3. A commonly used, non-systematic name for an organism.
    • Trivial names such as "worm", "shrimp", "fish", "toad", "cobra", "vulture", and "mahogany", though convenient and popular, do not refer to any systematically-defined biological groupings of organisms.
  4. A specific epithet.

Questions about trivial names

What is trivial names the plural of?
Trivial names is the plural of trivial name.

Words near trivial names in the dictionary

  1. trivial absolute values
  2. trivial functional dependencies
  3. trivial functional dependency
  4. trivial group
  5. trivial name
  6. trivial names
  7. trivial solution
  8. trivial solutions
  9. trivial topologies
  10. trivial topology
  11. trivialisation

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: trivial names (page history and authors); trivial name (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “trivial names.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/trivial_names. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.