Compendium of Pesticide Common Names
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Additional information
Additional data on many pesticides are available in the BCPC Online Pesticide Manual. Such data include, where available, physical, toxicological and ecotoxicological properties of pesticides, uses, commercial products containing the pesticide, manufacturers, Resistance Action Committee identifiers and codes, target site of action, etc.
Analytical methods
Analytical methods for some pesticides are available from the Collaborative International Pesticides Analytical Council (CIPAC)) and from the US EPA Pesticide Analytical Methods.
Origin of common names
Common names for pesticides are normally invented by the original manufacturer, and submitted to ISO TC/81 for approval, following the procedures in ISO 257 Pesticides and other agrochemicals – Principles for the selection of common names.
Printed version of the Compendium
One of the strong points of the Compendium is the ease and speed with which new information can be added and errors can be corrected. Printed equivalents to the Compendium include The Pesticide Manual and the full set of ISO 1750:1981 Pesticides and other agrochemicals – Common names and its addenda and amendments.
Pronunciation of common names
Common names of pesticides include syllables that are familiar to chemists, but members of the general public often have no idea how to pronounce them. Only a few pesticide names find their way into general-purpose printed or online dictionaries that indicate pronunciation. The pronunciation of common names obviously varies widely in the many countries in which they are used, and so it is not feasible to include pronunciations in ISO 1750:1981 Pesticides and other agrochemicals – Common names.
At one time, the British Standards Institution (BSI) maintained BS 1831 Common names for pesticides in parallel with ISO 1750, and included an indication of the British pronunciation of each name. These pronunciations are included in the Compendium, and have been used as a guide to generate pronunciations for almost all of the substances in the Compendium
Sources of information
Some information in the Compendium comes from submissions to ISO TC/81 by pesticide manufacturers. Other comes from a range of published and unpublished material.
- The IUPAC systematic names are derived using the published IUPAC rules.
- The CAS systematic names are generated by CAS themselves and are published in SciFinder® and other CAS reference sources.
- The InChI and InChIKey are generated from commercial chemical structure drawing programs.
- The structural formulae are original and the scaleable SVG images used in the data sheets are generated using commercial chemical structure drawing programs. The structures are intended to show the relationship between similar compounds, and conform as far as possible with the IUPAC 2008 recommendations ("Graphical Representation Standards For Chemical Structure Diagrams", Pure Appl. Chem., 2008, 80, 277).
- The classification scheme is partly derived from those widely used in the literature (for example as defined by the various Resistance Action Committees) and partly original and is largely based on chemical structure, not mode of action.
Trade names
The Compendium does not contain the trade names of pesticides. Many trade names for both current as well as obsolete products can be found in the Online Pesticide Manual.
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