[2] INNs are intended to make communication more precise by providing a unique standard name for each active ingredient, to avoid prescribing errors.
The antibacterial medication known as co-trimoxazole as well as those under the brand names Bactrim and Septran all contain two active ingredients easily recognisable by their INN: trimethoprim and sulfamethoxazole.
The WHO publishes INNs in English, Latin, French, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, and Chinese, and a drug's INNs are often cognate across most or all of the languages, with minor spelling or pronunciation differences, for example: paracetamol (en) paracetamolum (la), paracétamol (fr) and парацетамол (ru).
The World Health Organization collaborates closely with INN experts and national nomenclature committees to select a single name of worldwide acceptability for each active substance that is to be marketed as a pharmaceutical.
Pharmacology and pharmacotherapy (like health care generally) are universally relevant around the world, making translingual communication about them an important goal.
A drug's INNs are often cognates across most or all of the languages, but they also allow small inflectional, diacritic, and transliterational differences that are usually transparent and trivial for nonspeakers (as is true of most international scientific vocabulary).
Notably, the "same word" principle allows health professionals and patients who do not speak the same language to communicate to some degree and to avoid potentially life-threatening confusions from drug interactions.
[12] Thus a predictable spelling system, approximating phonemic orthography, is used, as follows: Many drugs are supplied as salts, with a cation and an anion.