Principles for Naming a Brand

For the sake of your users, please NEVER EVER name your brand or product after a generic word. It makes it nigh impossible for anyone to google search you or forums where people are solving problems.

For example, Firefox is a good name. It's unique but easy to spell and search for. Searching for "Firefox not refreshing" will usually return relevant results.

Cups is not a good, but you can eliminate most unrelated results by using "cupsd", "linux cups" or "cups print spooler" when searching for help.

Motion on the other hand is an absolutely horrible name. While it accurate describes what the software does (security camera motion detection), trying to troubleshoot the software is a PITA because "pets triggering motion" is absolutely useless as a search query and there isn't really a good way to eliminate everything on the internet related to moving pets.

I don't want to sound snarky... but I can't even pronounce this website's domain name. This breaks their own rules.

This hits on a lot of the same issues we have encountered when trying to name projects or name a business. In order to make name generation less time consuming and automatically handle some of these issues we ended up building a free tool called Mashword (https://mashword.com) to do a lot of the heavy lifting.

Mashword allows a user to enter one or two words and then it will generate combinations(mashups) of the words or alternate spellings, taking into account the pronunciation of the entered word(s). In addition, it will automatically check for domain name availability. If you are looking to name anything, try it out and hopefully it will speed up the naming process for you.

I find it quite amusing how brand names evolve. You can tell that "Flickr" came about from 2000's web 2.0 era. Similarly "Ultramax" from the 80's and "Rotomatic" from the 70's. Going by my last name, "Panchal & Sons Co." and "Panchal Brothers" would have come from the 19th and early 20th century.

I would say go back in time and explore various trends, and take inspiration from them. Also, explore different cultures and come up with made up words if it doesn't offend anyone, for e.g. "Masimoto" (Japan).

"McDonalds" listed as an example under Spelling, Spaces, Hyphens - Option 4 confuses me. Sure, it may have been a compound in its original language ("Mc" meaning "Son/Son of" IIRC) but I wouldn't consider it one in modern English. Definitely sticks out to me among the other reasonable examples. Of the options listed, I'd categorize it as timeless given that it's based on the founders' last name.

Damn. I misread the title as "How to Name a BAND