Nominology | Hacker News Reader

Nominology

messymatters.com

11 pointsteaspoon6 comments

This article was referred to by its author in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3180593, but I think it warrants its own entry on HN. I was briefly toying with the idea of writing up some algorithms for determining the seven criteria, but just don't have the time.

For some of the criteria it should be fairly easy to come up with some formula (e.g. for Brevity the cut-off values might be 6 and 10, and Greppability could be checked by the results of an actual grep call), while others are more subjective (particularly Evocativity). But if someone wants to pursue the idea I think it would be a nice little tool.

Wow, thank you! I'm delighted at the thought that the criteria may be useful.

My feeling is that brevity is trivially automatable, as you suggest: just pick the function. Though brevity in terms of syllables might also matter. ("Wikipedia" is a little longer than its string length suggests.)

Greppability is automatable by picking a corpus to grep in, though that's easier said than done.

Googlability (including checking the availability of domain names) is plenty automatable.

But the other four (evocativity, pronounceability, spellability, and verbability) seem pretty hopeless to me.

Well, for what it's worth, I quickly put up an Excel document which can help to assess a number of names quickly. I used Excel rather than Google spreadsheet since it has conditional cell formatting, which gives a nice background color. The spreadsheet can be found at http://j.mp/t2zRYQ

I think such a tool could be of great help for people picking names, similarly to the services you linked to in your article, even if one had to manually enter all the grades, simply so one could compare different ideas. A Web tool would be much better than my little spreadsheet, and If I had the time I'd build it myself; and if someone doesn't beat me to it I probably well. :)

Note: it turns out the real name for "nominology" (the study of naming things) is "onomastics". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onomastics

I'd have thought nomenclature was a better fit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomenclature

Ah, I almost thought so too, but, well, quoting myself from the article:

The word "nomenclature" is almost there, but not quite. "Nomenclature" has several meanings, including simply a name or designation, a system of naming, or a set of names. It can also refer to the act of naming. But none of the meanings refer directly to the consideration of the criteria for what makes good names. Also, with "nomenclature" it's harder to form derivatives like "nominologist" or even "nominologize". I take this stuff way too seriously.

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