What's in a synonym? A nose by any other name would smell

Introduction: Communication in the biomedical sciences and clinical practice would be clearer if everyone used the same set of technical terms. Technical vocabularies, such as international standard terminologies, are attempts to avoid common linguistic problems, such as synonymy (many names for a single entity) and polysemy (many meanings for a single term). Materials and Methods: Efforts made in human anatomical nomenclature since the late 19th century to deal with these issues were reviewed. Results: The new designations official term, equivalent term, synonym and related term are defined, and current challenges (e.g., eponyms) are identified. Discussion: The addition of synonyms and related terms to the international standard anatomical terminology allows indexing of these terms to the official terms and evaluation of the relationships between terms.