“Startup Names” by Paul Graham (2006) | Hacker News Reader

“Startup Names” by Paul Graham (2006)

aux.messymatters.com

"Nominology is my neologism for the study of naming things!"

It's called onomastics, son. Now get off my lawn.

Delighted that this is one of the first comments! :)

Note the update on the "nominology" article: "As soon as this went to print, Rob Felty (a linguist) informed me that the established term for what I've called nominology is onomastics. Scooped by 295 years!"

And further discussion in the comments: http://messymatters.com/nominology/

Onomastics:

EVOC - R

BREV - Y

GREP - G

GOOG - G

PRON - Y

SPEL - Y

VERB - R

Nominology:

EVOC - Y

BREV - Y

GREP - G

GOOG - G

PRON - G

SPEL - Y

VERB - Y (nominologize?)

Seems like nominology wins on at least a couple nominological categories. :)

Ha, nice! I mean, "onomastics" really should win simply for already being the established term. But if one were picking the name from scratch then I'd say "nominology" has probably...

    * greater evocativity (at least for us philistines)
    * nearly equal brevity (same number of chars, one more syllable)
    * equal greppability and googlability
    * greater spellability, maybe (again, at least for us philistines)
    * equal pronouncability
    * equal verbability (nominologize/onomasticize, nominological/onomastic, nominologist/onomastician)

Of course "nominology" mixes Greek and Latin roots so that's presumably fingernails on a blackboard for more educated folk than me. Cf http://messymatters.com/nominology/#comment-530036107

This article raises some refreshing points on the startup naming process.

It can be quite tough - and I ran into the naming problem many times over the years. Over 100,000,000 com domains are registered, iirc. It reached the point where I would spend days trying to come up with something that was a) good and b) available.

Frankly, I ended up feeling that finding a good name for a new project of mine was quite unlikely to happen. Which lead me the idea that the only way I'd be able to find usable (let alone high quality) names was by making a tool to help make it easier.

So I built Namebird - http://shobia.com/namebird

For it, I came up with a variety of probability based algorithims to generate names that are catchy and memorable. It works pretty nicely, imo. And, in making it, it has been able to help me find a large amount of domain names that would be good for startups.

Perhaps some here might find it of value.

All you need to produce a 'good' name is a simple script, a list of adjectives and a list of critters. A few sample runs from my proprietary name generator produces these CamelCased (KamlKzed?) marvels of ingenuity:

    FragrantDuck
    CourteousOwl
    RecklessPig
    OtherMoose
    CaringFrog
    MindlessFish
    UpbeatLizard
    WhisperedHippo
    SlushyWhale
    OilyAccountant
    CompassionateHog
    InstructiveMonkey
    ForkedCow
    ...

Of course I did not work on this script for quite a while, and it shows. To be really trendy I'd have to remove some vowels here and there, change a 'c' for a 'k' now and add the odd '-ly'.

KamlKzed...brilliant! I already have a failed startup called CompassionateHogly. We built software for calculating optimal broom width for a given arm length.

Otherwise that's the best list I've seen yet!

I know this comment doesn't contribute much to the conversation here, but your comment made me laugh way too hard to not let you know. Sorry your startup failed.

ForkedCow.com is not available... because I just bought it :-) Thanks!

Looks like FusedCow is ruining your Googlability

The plan is to overcome that by first building a billion dollar company behind forkedcow.

The next Omaha Steaks?

My startup name generator[1] does something very similar. Instead of adjectives and critters it uses tech and culinary terms. Here's the first 5 it came up with:

  SteamWare
  MountFont
  CaviarBeta
  ChipBinary
  SystemCocoa

[1] http://montanaflynn.me/lab/startup-name-generator/

I got FragmentSalad, a great name. Haven't thought of a company to go with it yet, but that shouldn't hold me back...

A tool to save, search, share and make best use of code snippets/fragments.

So, looking at the "nominology" article, and considering our name ( "Fogbeam Labs", with domain name fogbeam.com), I'd rank our name like this

EVOC - neutral. Fogbeam is evocative of something to do with light and illumination, so if we were a LED bulb manufacturer or something, it would be good. But we're using it as a metaphor, since we're a software company focusing on knowledge management, integration and collaboration. I think our tagline/slogan plays ties it together though "Cut through the information fog".

BREV - I think we're good here.

GREP - Yep.

GOOG - Very much. There are very few other references to the phrase "fogbeam" and the few there are relate to something obviously different - bulbs for auto fog lamps, etc.

PRON - Yep.

SPEL - Yep.

VERB - Fail. I don't think anybody will ever say "Go fogbeam that" to anybody else. :-(

For the most part, we get a lot of positive comments on the name when we introduce ourselves to people, so all in all, that's one decision that has worked out well. I don't think our name is so special that it will cause us to succeed all on it's own (could any name do that?) but I think it's more than good enough to not be an impediment.

What do you guys think?

As the original author of that article, I declare this nominologist-approved! :) Your analysis on each dimension seems spot on to me. Yay http://fogbeam.com !

PS: I don't think verbability is a total fail either. Hard to predict that one. Maybe some kind of "beam me up" phrasing could become the verbified version...

I looked up YouOS, what a blast from an (idealistic) past:

http://www.youos.com/html/static/manifesto.html

Sounds like a Chromebook.

Or, you know, the Internet in general ;)

Previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3180593

Reddit was "seemingly taken over by teenage boys"

... was there a time it wasn't. Love that. Love reddit.

Also, dotomator can be useful for generating ideas. http://www.dotomator.com/

Around late 2005-2006 it wasn't so bad, it was more 20-something guys in tech. A significant enough portion of the articles on the front page were related to programming or tech-real topics (esp. startups), or long-read articles, and while there was bickering, there were also interesting discussions in comments that didn't get dragged down by trolls and teenage-boyness. By 2007 the kids ranting about politics and atheism, the image links that were just a picture of a slogan, the trolling, the lame joke accounts, and the rest were picking up steam, and Startup News was created as a less awful alternative by pg (and also as an Arc demo), which was eventually renamed Hacker News. There was an early reddit exodus to HN to get away from reddit's worst excesses in 2007-8, especially when the horrible Digg exodus to reddit was happening.

But you can't really generalize about Reddit nowadays, as it's a collection of tens of thousands of subreddits. There are still plenty that are fine.

Probably true, I mostly stopped paying attention around 2010, so when I occasionally hit it now my subreddits are not highly curated to stay ahead of the horde.

I'm not sure a name has that much of an impact on a business's success. I posted this comment in another thread recently: The word "Target" doesn't really carry any signal about what that company actually does. Ask yourself, in Target's infancy, did the name hurt or help them? I'd guess it had very little to do with their eventual outcome.

Target wasn't actually a startup though - it was an offshoot of Dayton's department store (that name being a relic from the era when it was much more common to name one's business after oneself). As I understand it, the main criterion for choosing a name was it had to be sufficiently distinct from "Dayton's" so as to avoid tarnishing that brand by association with the new lower-cost subsidiary.

Man Kevin Hale is an amazing startup founder and the whole team from Wufoo was great. However, that name is properly terrible, and I think that it succeeded in spite of that name. Something about it is extremely off putting. Luckily the product and team were phenomenal.

I recently spent some time (probably more than I should have) at naming my new project.

I went through a couple of namegenerators and I found bustaname.com to be the best of the lot - specially it's realtime domain availability check (.com/.org/.net)

Pair it with namechk.com to check availability of social media handles.

If you are looking for random 4/5/6 letter domains that might be available (mostly sedo) then domainnamesoup.com is at it - eg: http://www.domainnamesoup.com/5letterdomainnames.php

> Nothing could be less cool than calling a startup “cool.com”

cuil.com had its 15 minutes of fame, but I see that Google acquired their patents and domain names:

http://searchengineland.com/googler-killer-cuil-patent-appli...

http://whois.domaintools.com/cuil.com

http://whois.domaintools.com/cuil.net

and meanwhile, something seemingly "uncuil" like DuckDuckGo is still around and is being included as an optional search engine in most modern browsers. One really can't predict what makes the cut in the end based on name alone...

I was talking to my parents about my latest side project, Anorak (http://anorakci.com) and they both laughed at the name.

I genuinely felt embarrassed when I explained to them that the majority of startups etc have "silly" names. As I was talking about Anorak to them, every time I said it's name, I felt silly.

And yet, it's never bothered me before.

I'm not changing the name, but it made me realise.

That ci on the end hard to remember. I checked and anorak is taken--as usual, but there's got to be something else? Maybe Theanorak?

It is, but it stands for "continuous integration" - I'd have gone with "anorak.com" but as you said, it's taken.

A while back I created a startup name generator by fusing tech and culinary terms together. I also set it up to check if the .com is available. It gets a decent amount of traffic and a few domains purchased every once in a while.

Check it out: http://montanaflynn.me/lab/startup-name-generator/

That is really slick.

Thanks, I've had a few people tell me it relieved a bunch of stress from choosing the perfect name. I plan to extend it with different term groups (space, sports, etc...) so you can fine tune the results to your specific startup industry.

I'm also proud of the way I implemented[1] the Domainr API[2] to check for domain availability. Previously I checked it in the backend but it made things very slow so now the backend generates the domains and the client lazily checks the availability.

[1] http://montanaflynn.me/lab/startup-name-generator/assets/mag...

[2] https://www.mashape.com/nbio/domainr

That is pretty cool.

Things like this seem like touchstone topics for startups, HBO's Silicon Valley had a scene with the sanest member of their group at a whiteboard filled with names desperately saying "choose one so we can get back to work", and I've certainly been in the same spot. I wonder if startups just compress the ridiculous corporate silliness into short bursts.

after you have potential names, here's my step-by-step walkthrough for the US trademark application process - http://adlervermillion.com/how-to-trademark-part-2-registrat...

The trademark application process, at its core, is simple data collection. Sadly, the TM Office website complicates this simple process with a set of baffling forms. Their design philosophy is “more but worse.” Only 40% of DIY apps are approved, so a TM lawyer is recommended. But if you're going to go DIY, just gird yourself for a miserable user experience.

"In a world where all the obvious names are taken, finding a good name is a test of imagination. And the name you choose tells whether or not you passed that test."

Then again, what you make of the name also matters.

Completely agree. There will always be good names available. Curious if PG would still rate textpayme high as I think its an awful name!

Selfishly curious, how would you rate my company's name, Modea?

I'm unsure how it's pronounced (mode-ee-ah vs mode-ay), and have absolutely no idea what you do. It sounds trendy though.

I see Modea, I think Medea, which is probably not the connotation you want. OTOH, who's familiar with classical mythology these days?

> It’s like running Microsoft software on your servers. [Like StackOverflow, launched in 2008, does!]

That is a fact I've condemned about Stack Exchange and their founders on Meta.

Interesting that he scores "Yahoo" poorly on Googlability. I'm not sure if that's a joke, but "Yahoo" is certainly very Googlable.

Yahoo was around and well established before google even showed up. If Yahoo was a new startup today then it could struggle.

The only other place I've ever heard it used is in Gulliver's Travels, and I believe is the origin.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000635/

Quoting myself from the hovertext on the "Yahoo" scores:

> Yahoo is of course googlable today but from the perspective of choosing new names, anything that's a dictionary word isn't very unique

"Nothing could be less cool, at this point, than calling a startup “cool.com.”"

Interestingly enough, that domain name is for sale.

better than cuil.com

What if someone registered show.hn? :-)

The best names have two syllables.

I tend to agree with you, do you know of any software projects to programmatically determine syllables?

http://www.nltk.org/

Couldn't find anything that says it officially supports counting of syllables but stackoverflow provided this possible solution:

  from nltk.corpus import cmudict
  d = cmudict.dict()
  def nsyl(word):
    return [len(list(y for y in x if y[-1].isdigit())) for x in d[word.lower()]]

Or, sound so foreign people look up the meaning--like Physibles? I guess that website could promote any name though?

Capitalize the first letter of a noun and remove vowels at will.

Example, sewage => Sewg

no clue why you got downvoted, thanks for the advice

Crippled names imply crippled products. Dropping vowels should be your last option.

Like flickr?

Yes, names like Flickr.

Names with dropped vowels look like typos, typos relate to sloppy work, so that's an association you get with a name like this. You then have to put in extra work to undo it. Can it be undone? Sure, but why create this hurdle in the first place?

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