Summary appendix | Rupert Alexander Howard Barnes

(From “Letters and Characters – towards a Standard“)

Acceptable letters and diacritical marks

Ordinary Latin alphabet letters, without diacritics:

Additional ligatures:

Letters bearing diacritics:

(Those used only in Esperanto are shown in Italics)

Ẃ

Ẁ

Ỳ

Ẅ

Arabic Numerals:

Punctuation and other marks:

‘

(

)

–

“

;

₹

€

Marks for consideration:

[

]

The 2014 Regulations

The Tables of characters acceptable in company names, from The Company, Limited Liability Partnership and Business (Names and Trading Disclosures) Regulations 2015, are:

Table 1

Characters, signs and symbols

(Organised by base letter; the Regulations list the characters in the same order but in a seamless 5 x 26 table.)

Ấ

Ẁ

Ẃ

Ẅ

Ỳ

€

Table 2

Punctuation

Apostrophe	‘	’	‘
Bracket	(	)	[	]	{	}	<	>
Exclamation mark	!
Guillemet	«	»
Inverted comma	“	”	“
Question mark	?
Solidus	\	/

Table 3

Signs and symbols

(In addition a company name may contain a figure (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9), a full stop, comma, colon, semi-colon or hyphen and any other punctuation referred to in Table 2 in Schedule 1 (as above).

Equivalences

If a letter bears a diacritic the letter should be compared to the plain letter. The following comparisons should also be made:

Æ	≡	AE
Œ	≡	OE
Þ	≡	TH
Ð	≡	D
ß	≡	SS
&	≡	AND
+	≡	AND

Equivalence rules in the 2015 Regulations

The 2014 Regulations also contain a table of equivalences, to determine whether a proposed company name is to be deemed the same as another. The table, in Schedule 3 of the Regulations, is as follows:

Column 1 (permitted characters)	Column 2 (to be treated the same as)
À Á Â Ã Ä Å Ā Ă Ą Ấ	A
Æ Ǽ	AE
Ç Ć Ĉ Ċ Č	C
Þ Ď Ð	D
È É Ê Ë Ē Ĕ Ė Ę Ě	E
Ĝ Ğ Ġ Ģ	G
Ĥ Ħ	H
Ì Í Î Ï Ĩ Ī Ĭ Į İ	I
Ĵ	J
Ķ	K
Ĺ Ļ Ľ Ŀ Ł	L
Ñ Ń Ņ Ň Ŋ	N
Ò Ó Ô Õ Ö Ø Ō Ŏ Ő Ǿ	O
Œ	OE CE
Ŕ Ŗ Ř	R
Ś Ŝ Ş Š	S
Ţ Ť Ŧ	T
Ù Ú Û Ü Ũ Ū Ŭ Ů Ű Ų	U
Ŵ Ẁ Ẃ Ẅ	W
Ỳ Ý Ŷ Ÿ	Y
Ź Ż Ž	Z

(Interestingly, Þ is compared with D, not with TH.)