In their English forms, the conjoined names may have the following patterns: • concatenation, e.g.
Papua New Guinea •
grammatical conjunction, e.g.
Trinidad and Tobago The punctuation and capitalization practices in written English vary: • merging into one word without an intermediate space, e.g.
Budapest • standing apart, e.g.
Papua New Guinea • conjunction by
hyphenation. While English-speakers are relaxed about using a hyphen or not, this punctuation once caused
controversy between Czechs and Slovaks • conjunction with an
en dash, typically when the usage is associative, attributive or is a juxtaposition of two independent entities. •
CamelCase may sometimes be attempted, but many style guides recommend against this in formal English-language use. Three-word names for two-part entities are often ambiguous. For example, it may not be clear whether North Rhine-Westphalia is an amalgamation between the north part of the
Rhine Province on the one hand and
Westphalia on the other (true) or the northern division of some pre-existing place called Rhine-Westphalia (false). While this problem does not arise in German, no entirely satisfactory punctuation of such names has been established in English. In the above case, the hyphen is often omitted because it is misleading. It has been proposed that this state's name be punctuated "North-Rhine/Westphalia" in English, but the solidus or forward slash is also ambiguous.
Neologisms Some names have been merged and modified as an alternative to using
hyphenation or
grammatical conjunction: •
BosWash: the
megalopolis extending from
Boston to Washington, D.C.,
CamelCase example (extended in fiction into a
Boston–Atlanta Metropolitan Axis or BAMA covering most of the US East Coast) •
SeaTac: another example of CamelCase (
Seattle and
Tacoma,
Washington) •
Czechoslovakia: the
Czech lands and
Slovakia •
Senegambia:
Senegal and
Gambia •
Tanzania:
Tanganyika and
Zanzibar False double placenames Binomial placenames are not true double placenames, but elements in a
hierarchical naming system. They are a means of distinguishing two entities which share a parent geographic feature. Examples: •
Guinea-Bissau (official name of the country with capital
Bissau, as distinct from
Guinea, with capital
Conakry) • Congo-
Brazzaville and Congo-
Kinshasa (from the respective capitals of what are officially
Republic of the Congo and
Democratic Republic of the Congo) They are often used for railway stations and airports: •
King's Cross St Pancras, the
London Underground station serving two separate London railway terminals:
King's Cross and
St Pancras railway stations. •
Paris - Orly Airport, one of two Paris airports •
Trenton–Mercer Airport, actually located in
Ewing, outside
Trenton, both in
Mercer County. Trenton–Mercer is an example of a marketing decision in which a small airport tries to associate itself with a larger city.
Ryanair has been criticized for promoting names for airports unusually far from the city from which they are named, such as
Paris Beauvais Tillé Airport (a triple name) and
Frankfurt-Hahn Airport. Binomial names may be seen in German-language texts to denominate parts of towns: •
Bergen-Belsen: the Belsen section within the municipality of Bergen. (This form is now fixed in English when referring to the Nazi concentration camp and the present memorial there.) •
Berlin-Charlottenburg: the district of
Charlottenburg, Berlin The word "and" in its name does not always signify the union of two distinct territories: •
Sala y Gómez: one island named for two people •
Lewis and Clark County, Montana: named for
Meriwether Lewis and
William Clark In
dual naming, words in two different languages have been joined by a hyphen or a slash to become the community's (or geographic feature's) official name, often because of
language politics: •
Vitoria-Gasteiz: the combination of this city's Spanish name of
Vitoria and
Basque name of
Gasteiz •
Dingle/Daingean Uí Chúis: proposed official name (combining English and Irish-language names) of a town in the
County Kerry Gaeltacht. •
Aoraki / Mount Cook: mountain in New Zealand with
Māori and English names combined. Many geographic features of New Zealand are officially designated in a similar way (and the country as a whole is sometimes unofficially referred to as "
Aotearoa New Zealand"). Similarly, places may simply have an official name which consists of two names, such as the Australian territory of the
Cocos (Keeling) Islands, which consists of the North Keeling Island and the South Keeling Islands.
Transitional names Sometimes names will be concatenated during a name change.
Zimbabwe Rhodesia was the name of the former Rhodesia and future Zimbabwe from June 1 to December 12, 1979. ==Sovereign states==