How Typhoons Get Their Names (The Rotating Lists, Retired Names, Why the Philippines Uses Its Own)

Dolphin. Nari. Haikui. Mawar.

Typhoon names sound arbitrary. They are not. There is a list, it rotates, and fourteen countries take turns contributing to it.

Nobody at a news desk picks them. The name is assigned the moment the system reaches tropical storm strength, straight off a sheet that was agreed years in advance.

Here is how that sheet works.

The list is not alphabetical

This is the first thing that surprises people who know the Atlantic system.

Atlantic hurricanes run A to Z. Alberto, Beryl, Chris. Six lists rotating every six years.

The northwest Pacific does not work that way.

There are 140 names, contributed by 14 countries and territories in the region. Cambodia, China, North Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, Laos, Macau, Malaysia, Micronesia, the Philippines, South Korea, Thailand, the United States, and Vietnam.

Each country submitted ten names. The list runs through them in order of the contributing country's name in English, then loops back to the start.

So the sequence has nothing to do with the alphabet and everything to do with whose turn it is.

When the list finishes, it starts again. No year resets. A name that came up in one August might return three years later, mid-sequence.

The names themselves are not people

Another difference from the Atlantic.

Western Pacific names are mostly animals, plants, foods, and natural features. Cambodia contributed Nakri, a flower. Japan contributes constellation names. Micronesia sends names from local languages.

Some are unexpectedly ordinary. There has been a typhoon called Goni, which is a swan. One called Maliksi, meaning fast. One called Bualoi, a Thai dessert.

Dolphin came from Hong Kong. It refers to the Chinese white dolphin found in local waters.

The choice was deliberate. Human names create a kind of familiarity that some agencies wanted to avoid, and rotating names among fourteen cultures spreads the naming across the region rather than concentrating it.

Retired names

A name gets removed when the storm attached to it does enough damage that reusing the name would be inappropriate.

Haiyan is gone. Retired after 2013 in the Philippines. So is Rammasun. So is Bopha.

The contributing country proposes a replacement, and the committee approves it at the annual session.

This is why the list drifts over time. Look at a 1990s list next to a current one and a noticeable fraction has been swapped out.

Retirement is not automatic at any particular death toll or damage figure. A member country requests it, usually the one that was hit hardest.

The Philippines names storms twice

This causes more confusion than anything else in tropical cyclone naming.

PAGASA, the Philippine weather agency, assigns its own local name to any storm entering the Philippine Area of Responsibility. That happens regardless of whether the storm already has an international name.

So a system can be Typhoon Doksuri internationally and Typhoon Egay in Manila. Same storm. Two names, live at the same moment, in the same week.

The Philippine list is alphabetical, restarts each year, and uses names that sound familiar locally.

The reason is practical. Local warnings reach more people when the name sounds like something from home rather than a word contributed by another country.

If you are tracking a storm across Filipino and international sources and it appears to split into two systems, this is what happened.

Who decides

The ESCAP/WMO Typhoon Committee. It meets annually, reviews the season, handles retirements, and approves replacement names.

Membership is the same fourteen countries and territories that contribute names.

The Japan Meteorological Agency is the designated regional centre for the northwest Pacific, which means JMA is the body that formally assigns the name when a system reaches tropical storm strength.

The Joint Typhoon Warning Center, run by the US military, tracks the same storms and issues its own numbering — 12W, 13W and so on — which is why you sometimes see a storm referred to by a number rather than a name.

Two systems, both valid, describing the same thing.

Why any of this matters to a traveller

Mostly it does not. But two parts do.

First, the Philippine double naming. If you are watching a storm approach and the Filipino name looks like a separate system, you may think you have more time than you do.

Second, retired names carry information. If you are researching a region's typhoon history and a name has been retired, that tells you something happened there worth reading about.

Beyond that, the name is a label. What matters is the warning level where you are, not what the storm is called.

Where to check this yourself

Japan Meteorological Agency: https://www.jma.go.jp/en/typh/

Korea Meteorological Administration: https://www.kma.go.kr/eng/weather/typoon/typhoon_05.jsp

Joint Typhoon Warning Center: https://www.metoc.navy.mil/jtwc/jtwc.html

Hong Kong Observatory: https://www.hko.gov.hk/en/index.html

China National Meteorological Center: http://www.nmc.cn/publish/typhoon/typhoon.html

The JMA page carries the official name assignment. PAGASA publishes the Philippine name separately.

A correction worth making

Earlier coverage on this site referred to storms by category number as though that were the official western Pacific classification. It is not.

The same applies to names. Using the international name alone can leave out the Philippine name entirely, which matters if the readership includes anyone in that area.

Both names will be given here where a storm has two.

The short version

140 names, 14 countries, rotating in turn. Not alphabetical.

Mostly animals, plants and weather words rather than people.

Names get retired when the storm does enough damage.

And the Philippines names every storm twice, which is why one system sometimes looks like two.