Prof. M. Grenon asked the team of the General Catalogue of Variable Stars to attribute GCVS names to new Hipparcos variables in order to present, in the Hipparcos Catalogue, the information on these stars already with final designations. We received lists of 5665 variables. Of them, 3157 qualified to the standard GCVS criteria and will appear in the 74th Namelist of variable stars.

The main problems in compiling the Namelist were the following:

1. 1. Cases of spurious variability for double and multiple stars and for misidentified stars (wrong colour indices used in reductions). Some wrong identifications come from the SIMBAD data base.

2. 2. Lacking identifications with catalogues of spectroscopic binaries. Some stars attributed to slowly pulsating B variables are in fact ellipsoidal variables. HIP 98954 = V1472 Aql was classified as a semiregular star, but it is a rather unusual, probably eclipsing, star (Samus, 1997), a known spectroscopic-binary M giant with a 200d period (Lucke and Mayor, 1982).