Latin binomials, popularised in the 18th century by the Swedish naturalist Linnaeus, have stood the test of time in providing a stable, clear, and memorable system of nomenclature across biology. However, relentless and ever-deeper exploration and analysis of the microbial world has created an urgent need for huge numbers of new names for Archaea and Bacteria. Manual creation of such names remains difficult and slow and typically relies on expert-driven nomenclatural quality control. Keen to ensure that the legacy of Linnaeus lives on in the age of microbial genomics and metagenomics, we propose an automated approach, employing combinatorial concatenation of roots from Latin and Greek to create linguistically correct names for genera and species that can be used off the shelf as needed. As proof of principle, we document over a million new names for Bacteria and Archaea. We are confident that our approach provides a road map for how to create new names for decades to come.

拉丁二项式由瑞典博物学家林奈在 18 世纪推广，经受住了时间的考验，提供了一个稳定、清晰和令人难忘的跨生物学命名系统。然而，对微生物世界的不懈和不断深入的探索和分析已经产生了对古细菌和细菌的大量新名称的迫切需求。手动创建此类名称仍然困难且缓慢，并且通常依赖于专家驱动的命名质量控制。热衷于确保林奈的遗产在微生物基因组学和宏基因组学时代继续存在，我们提出了一种自动化方法，采用拉丁语和希腊语的词根组合连接，为可以现成使用的属和物种创建语言上正确的名称如所须。作为原理证明，我们记录了超过一百万个细菌和古细菌的新名称。我们相信，我们的方法为未来几十年如何创建新名称提供了路线图。