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Comment by 256DEV | Hacker News Reader

One of my hobbies is the diametric opposite of this approach, I enjoy trawling domain auctions for short .coms that don't include any dictionary words but still sound fun. I love names like Quora that are meaningless but still somehow feel like they should be a real word! I believe the academic category for these is "lexical gap". During the pandemic I got a little too much into it and so now I'm actually busy working on a site to list them for sale - https://wuzmo.com - the plan is to make it essentially a cheap brandbucket.

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Quora is a real word, it is the plural of Quorum.

It seems it's not how the site got the name:

https://www.quora.com/Does-Quora-come-from-the-plural-versio...

The most upvoted answer seems totally made up.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=%22Quora+...

Well well, I did not know that.. Thanks for expanding my vocab! Maybe a better example would have been the similar Zuora!

Actually, Zuora is the plural of Zuorum (according to many poorly OCR'd PDFs I found on google). :D

> I believe the academic category for these is "lexical gap"

Lexical gap refers to potential words that, with regards to the language morphology or semantic rules, could have been part of the language.

I think it's systematic gap that might apply to some of the domains you're squatting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_gap

how is this not squatting and thus deplorable?

Squatting has an intention behind it. You don't call ancient coin collectors deplorable squatters because they are taking limited stock off the market.

But they're not collecting or w/e, they're searching and buying for the purpose of reselling. Which.. is squatting, no?

No they're collecting interesting domains, and then they said it got out of hand during the pandemic, and now theyre selling their collection.

Furthermore, even adding little icons to hint as to what the domain might be used for. I think it's a cool little idea.

It's squatting if you're not using the domain name for anything other than reselling it.

I think DALL-E would be a good way to come up with these. The nonsense text it adds to images is usually pronouncable and somehow always seems to match the theme you give it. GilaWhamm.com, anyone?

Domains for the Rest of Us. September 2020. 347 points. 200 comments. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24538758>

Now dead.

I have found amazing domain names by just checking auctions daily. I got both file.io and impervious.com on Flippa for around a few thousand each. I've started companies on both of these domains.

If you just check once a year, you likely won't find a good one. But if you check almost daily for years, you will eventually strike gold.

Has it ever turned out that one of these words means something dirty or profane or something in another language?

Interesting question! Well no one has complained so far, but I should definitely run them all through Google Translate to see. I could see this happening quite easily.

The one issue I did have was buying a domain on Namecheap auctions only to find it had been used very aggressively by spammers before going to auction. It made me think of the recent top HN post about how you could push a suspect domain to someone within a registrar and then implicate them without their knowledge. The Namecheap auction system happily let me buy the domain, but then as soon as it was in my account it got suspended and I got various emails from their security team about how many blocklists it was on and how I'd have to submit extensive documentation to get it unsuspended etc. Thankfully the support was helpful and now I check domains more thoroughly before I buy them...

Yeah. At my last job we made a pivot table tool feature into our project and we named it Pito after Pito Salas, thinking we were so clever and finally came up with a slick little branding for a feature. But that's slang for penis in Spanish... name lasted for a couple of years before it was replaced.

so you're squatting domains, cool

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