Clement Wragge, an Australian meteorologist of the early 1900s, is credited with being the first weather-person to have had the idea of giving names to tropical revolving storms. He started with letters from the Greek alphabet, then progressed through Greek and Roman mythology to the use of ordinary names.
The practice has continued more or less since then, informally at first, and then since 1953 under the aegis of the World Meteorological Organisation. WMO works by means of local representative committees drawn from the regions usually affected by the storms.
In the north Atlantic, for example, Caribbean hurricanes are named from six semi-permanent alphabetical lists, each set being repeated six years after it was last used; the one for the year 2000 was last used in 1994.
When a hurricane has had a major impact, any country affected by the storm may request, through WMO, that its name be "retired" which, strictly speaking, means it cannot be reused for at least 10 years.
This is intended to facilitate historical references, legal actions, insurance claims and so on, and to avoid public confusion with another storm of the same name. Hurricane Gilbert (1988), for instance, or Hugo (1989), and Mitch which caused such havoc in Central America in 1998, have all been superannuated.
In the Pacific, however, they do things slightly differently. The central north Pacific maintains four lists of typhoon names in alphabetical order, to be used sequentially. The name of the first typhoon in any year will probably not begin with "A" as it would in the Atlantic, but will be given the name on the current list immediately following the last one used in the previous year. A similar system prevails around Australia.
The western north Pacific, however, is more complex. There we find five lists of 14 names to be used sequentially, but instead of the typhoons' names being in alphabetical order, it is the countries of the region that are so arranged; each country in its turn, starting with Cambodia and China, through Japan and Laos on to Vietnam, contributes any name it likes, and the result is a list in no alphabetical or cultural order. And finally, you will sometimes hear of cyclones which, rather than having a girl's or boy's name, are called simply "00-4C" or "99-2A". This desire for alpha-numeric anonymity seems to apply only in the Arabian sea and the Bay of Bengal, for no reason except the authorities there seem to have no wish to do what weather-people do elsewhere.