If you're taking pharmarmacology this semester, you need to understand drug names. So, you have the generic name and you have the trade or brand name. The generic name is not owned by a company. It's the official name of the drug. It's non-proprietary, meaning it isn't the property of any one company where the trade or brand name is owned and named by a company. The trade or brand name is proprietary again meaning it's owned by a company. Since these are owned by someone, they normally have a trademark symbol like this. It's important to know the generic names are always written in lowercase and the trade or brand names are written in uppercase. So to review, generic name is not owned by a company, meaning it's non-proprietary and it's always lowercase. Where the trade name is owned and named by a company, it's proprietary and it always starts with an uppercase letter. Let's walk through an example. We have ibuprofen. This is the generic name again not owned by anybody. One of the brand names for ibuprofen is Advil. You can see here ibuprofen is written small and Advil is the brand name written big. Now another brand name of ibuprofen is Motrin because ibuprofen is the generic name not owned by a company but this company chose to call it Advil and this company chose to call it Motrin. All right, now back to the names. It's important you know the enclelex only test on generic names. You won't see brand or trade names on the ENLEX. This is good news because the generic name is where you see those helpful suffixes and prefixes. If you're taking pharmarmacology class this semester, be sure to grab the pharmacology flashcards. They allow you to quiz yourself on all the must know medications and find where your knowledge deficits are before exam day. You can find them on my shop, Nurse in the Making, and start quizzing yourself today. Happy studying, future nurses.