No future hurricanes will be named "Isis," the United Nation's World Meteorological Organization (WMO) announced Friday. The name has been dropped due to its unfortunate association with the Islamic State - which is often referred to via the abbreviation of its former name, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS.
The name had already been assigned to a hurricane due to emerge in the Northeast Pacific Ocean in early 2016 - until now.
A WMO spokesman told Reuters "Isis" had been rebranded as "Ivette."
While ISIS has particular visibility at the moment, a separate spokesman told TIME magazine that the name change is somewhat routine.
“Names are knocked off the list, which rotates every six years, if they are considered inappropriate if they caused too much damage and too much death,” spokesman Clare Nullis stated.
Hurricanes and tropical cyclones are named on an A-Z basis for identification purposes, with different names being assigned to different oceanic regions.
Typically, hurricane names are retired after inflicting a historic level of damage; the name "Katrina," for example, was replaced by "Katia" after Hurricane Katrina struck the southeastern US in 2005.