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Comment by lewiscarson | Hacker News Reader

As per PG: “It turns out almost any word or word pair that is not an obviously bad name is a sufficiently good one, and the number of such domains is so large that you can find plenty that are cheap or even untaken. So make a list and try to buy some. That's what Stripe did. (Their search also turned up parse.com, which their friends at Parse took.)”

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Made me think. What are non-obviously bad names that were allowed to stay and weren’t?

Off the top of my mind:

- Siri means ass in Japanese. Apple kept the name and except for some initial memes people seems to be used to it.

- Colgate apparently sounds similar to hang yourself in some Spanish dialects (Argentinian according to google). I’m a bit uncertain if it kept its name there

- Kalpis (Japanese soft drink) changed its name overseas as marketing feared it sounded too similar to “cow piss”

- Moana/Vaiana. Disney used different names for this movie between America and Europe, allegedly because of a name clash with an Italian politician/adult movie star. The name change wasn’t an afterthought as the original cast recorded all relevant lines and songs with both names for a simultaneous release across markets.

- the 2002 movie “XXX” was read by many as an word for pornography and top result on google for the name returns porn sites along with IMDb. Unabashedly the studio went on to create 3 movies in the franchise. I think that shows even obviously bad names can work. XXX was advertised on billboards and prime time TV across territories.

When the makers of Irish Mist whiskey liqueur decided to start selling to the German market it caused them some laughs but afaik they stuck with the name

The Rolls Royce Silver Mist got a rebrand to Silver Shadow because German.

I always figured XXX was an attempt to prevent people from finding it on torrent sites.

That would be impressive since the movie came out in 2002, one year after BitTorrent was invented.

Well, there were lots of other file-sharing systems as well that were older, that it would have been just as effective on. I just misremembered the timeline.

I always liked the name of the Chevy Nova. "No Va", meaning "doesn't go" in Spanish, and somewhat close to it in Italian, Portuguese, etc.

Pinto is slang for small penis in Brazil. Apparently, the car sold better once rebranded to Corcel (horse).

Mitsubishi Pajero is another great one:

Mitsubishi marketed the SUV as the Montero in North America, Spain, and Latin America (except for Brazil and Jamaica) due to the term "pajero" being derogatory (meaning "wanker") in Spanish

This is apparently a myth, and the Nova sold just fine in Spanish speaking countries.

I mean, it's not a myth that it sounds like "doesn't go". It was perhaps a myth that it affected sales to a strong degree...though I didn't say anything about sales.

Hyundai Kona is named Kauai (after another Hawaiian island) in Portugal, since "cona" is slang for female genitalia.

"Colgate" sounds and it's spelled exactly like "hang yourself" in Uruguayan/Argentine Spanish, and I grew up there using that brand of toothpaste. There's even a very obvious children's joke based on the ambiguity.

> Siri means ass in Japanese.

Not exactly, that’s shiri. It’s just that si doesn’t exist as a sound in Japanese, so they approximate it with shi.

It’s also a form of shiru = to know, as in shiriai = acquaintance, so not totally inappropriate.

Only Westerners who use Hepburn would write it as shiri. Most native Japanese speakers use Nihon-shiki where they would absolutely write siri.

Wouldn't they write シリ? Why would they use a romanization at all?

To type kana with their keyboards on their computers.

Wix sounds like a word for masturbating in German.

As someone who has been involved in product line naming a number of times, it's something that's simultaneously fun, a PITA, and probably rarely makes much of a difference--especially for non-consumer products.

One in particular I was very involved with was a pretty good name but ended up as something that could have been confused with something else that became pretty popular for a time and various other branding associated with the name ended up being dropped relatively soon. (And the product itself was essentially redone from the ground up fairly soon as well.) The name had essentially nothing to do with anything.

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