 <p>Reserved words are a moving target. If the dbms doesn't expose them through a public interface, there isn't usually a good programmatic way to get to them.</p> <p>If you don't want to guard them with brackets, you risk incorporating symbols that are not reserved in your currently used version of SQL Server, but <em>are</em> reserved in some future version.</p> <p>I think your best bet is to use the quoting mechanism your dbms provides, since it's designed to deal with exactly this problem. For SQL Server, that means square brackets.</p>