How to convert species names into common names? I’m trying to find common names from a list of scientific names (not all will have them though).

I was attempting to use taxize in R but it aborts if it doesn’t find an entry in EOL and I don’t know a way around this other than manually editing the list - in which case I might as well check all this way.

Does anyone have a better way of doing this?
use the NCBI taxon dump under ftp://ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/pub/taxonomy

in taxdmp.zip you'll find all the names for a given NCBI taxon

$ grep -w ^9606 names.dmp 
9606    |   Homo sapiens    |       |   scientific name |
9606    |   Homo sapiens Linnaeus, 1758 |       |   authority   |
9606    |   human   |       |   genbank common name |
9606    |   man |       |   common name |