The widespread use and development of acupuncture and moxibustion in the world has led to both increasing international academic and scientific exchange on this topic and a rise in the number of publications on acupuncture. Consequently, there have been numerous translations of Chinese language acupuncture texts. Differences in the spelling and pronunciation of Chinese characters have led to the same acupuncture point having a wide variety of names. Furthering the potential for confusion, an array of alphanumeric codes has been given to meridian names and acupuncture points. There is an urgent need for a standard name and alphanumeric code.

In late 1980, the World Health Organization Regional Office for the Western Pacific (WPRO) began exploring the possibility of standardizing acupuncture nomenclature. This document compares the WPRO recommended standard nomenclature with the equivalent names and codes of meridians and acupuncture points as used in a number of publications in English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Vietnamese.