Learn English – coronavirus – Why no ‘c’ capital? Why is there no space

capitalization

It is written 'coronavirus' with no space and no capitalized 'c'. I'm not sure about it. It is the name of virus which makes it a proper noun. Plus, they should be two words like other viruses have. The list is here One of the known examples is Ebola virus.

Best Answer

The convention in English (and it may be different in other languages that use the Latin script) is that names of animals, plants and (by extension) viruses are not capitalised, unless part of the name comes from a proper noun.

So we have "blue tit" or "dog rose", but "Steller's sea eagle" and "African elephant" because Africa and Steller are the names of a continent and a person respectively. Ebola is capitalised as it is the name of a river in Africa (the Ebola river is a tributary of the Congo).

We also (again by convention) capitalise the scientific names of above the level of genus. So the blue tit is Cyanistes caeruleus in the family Paridae (the tit family) and the class Aves (birds).

Now "coronavirus" is not the scientific name (that is the subfamily Orthocoronavirinae). The particular one doing the rounds now is a Betacoronavirus. Instead "coronavirus" is the English name and so follows normal capitalisation for animals, plants and (by extension) viruses.

Names of viruses are often formed as single words with the suffix -virus. This is perhaps influenced by scientific use. There are rhinoviruses, noroviruses, adenovirus and so on. Again there isn't a logical rule, that is just how it is done. The virus that causes Ebola is known as ebolavirus (and note the downcasing when Ebola becomes a prefix).