Scientific names run on one rule: first published wins, and no two genera may share a name. George Shaw called this animal Platypus in 1799 without knowing a Berlin entomologist had given the same word to a beetle in 1793. The beetle was there first, so the platypus is not, officially, a platypus.

• Two men named it, neither knowing about the other. Shaw in London in 1799, Blumenbach in Göttingen in 1800, working from two different specimens sent home by two different routes. The name it ended up with is half of each: Blumenbach's genus, because Shaw's was unavailable, and Shaw's species, because his was published first.
• The authority is written in brackets. Ornithorhynchus anatinus (Shaw, 1799). The parentheses are the formal way of saying that the man who named it has since had his animal moved out of the genus he put it in. The whole argument on this sheet is compressed into two punctuation marks.
• The everyday word is the rejected one. Zoology gave platypus up and English kept it. Duckmole and water-mole, which were the ordinary settlers' words, are the ones that actually died.
• It had names already. Dozens of them, in languages that are not related to each other, for as long as there have been people on those rivers. None was taken up, and the entire naming argument was conducted without reference to any of them.
• A line stopped by a bar is a name that was refused. A rule through a form means it was really published and did not stand.

The Aboriginal names are given in the languages the sources attribute them to. The spellings are colonial-era transcriptions rather than the communities' own orthographies, and vary widely between wordlists. The account of Shaw and the scissors is from contemporary reports of his examination of the specimen; the claim sometimes made that the cuts are still visible is not something this chart asserts.

Elsewhere: The Same Idea · The Missing N · Empty Orchestra · Polite Company · The Same Word · Signs for Sounds · Heartwood · Every Language Family