section_path: Ownership and control/Naming
section_name: Naming
paragraph_text: Naming
  
  Corporations generally have a distinct name. Historically, some corporations were named after the members of their boards of directors: for example, the " President and Fellows of Harvard College " is the name of one of the two governing boards of Harvard University, but it is also the exact name under which Harvard was legally incorporated. Nowadays, corporations in most jurisdictions have a distinct name that does not need to make reference to the members of their boards. In Canada, this possibility is taken to its logical extreme: many smaller Canadian corporations have no names at all, merely numbers based on a registration number (for example, "12345678 Ontario Limited"), which is assigned by the provincial or territorial government where the corporation incorporates.
  
  In most countries, corporate names include a term or an abbreviation that denotes the corporate status of the entity (for example, "Incorporated" or "Inc." in the United States) or the limited liability of its members (for example, "Limited", "Ltd.", or "LLC"). These terms vary by jurisdiction and language. In some jurisdictions, they are mandatory, and in others, such as California, they are not. Their use puts everybody on constructive notice that they are dealing with an entity whose liability is limited: one can only collect from whatever assets the entity still controls when one obtains a judgment against it.
  
  Some jurisdictions do not allow the use of the word " company " alone to denote corporate status, since the word " company " may refer to a partnership or some other form of collective ownership (in the United States it can be used by a sole proprietorship but this is not generally the case elsewhere).