Q: May I know please whether if it is legal to register a special, long-standing word as a company's trademark!?

A: Hello. What is important to remember here is that a trademark is a word/phrase/logo that is used in association with the commercial offering of some kind of product or service. The association with a particular product or service is the key here, as there is no trademark without such an association. In this particular case, the applicant is asking to register that word in association with herbal topical creams and dietary food supplements, to name a few. The fact that the word exists, and has been used before, doesn't matter. The question is whether the word has been used to market creams and supplements, or similar items.

A couple of examples. Amazon is clearly a word that already existed, but the company began using that word in an arbitrary manner to describe its offering of books (and later everything else). That was a new, commercial use of an existing word. Maybe a better example would be "Three-peat." This word got thrown around by years (with sports announcers making the almost comical mistake of saying that Pat Riley had "patented" the word). However, the word was no being used to sell any products or services (you cannot argue that winning three championships in a row is a "service" you offer). So, eventually, Pat Riley actually did register Three-peat as a trademark, using it as a brand name for sportwear. The key there was that he started using it to sell a product, the sportwear, which moves the word from something people use to being eligible for trademark protection.

Hope that helps.