As a touch point for this post, The Name Inspector will look back on his old “10 company name types on TechCrunch” post, the most-visited page on this blog. That post broke down the names in the TechCrunch index at that time, which was much smaller than it is now, into a number of different categories. We can use those categories to help make sense of what’s going on here now, naming-wise.

Are there any surprises? Yes! Seattle is crazy about phrase names! Phrazy! Phrase names were only the third most numerous type in the TechCrunch post (making up about 25% of the names), but they’re numero uno here (about 34%). To be scientific, we have to acknowledge there are many possible explanations for this. Maybe the Seattle Startup Index includes a different range of types of companies than those found in TechCrunch in 2007. Maybe there’s been a nationwide change. Maybe it’s somehow related to all the coffee here. Maybe…

But that’s all speculation. Let’s get down to it.

First, what exactly counts as a phrase name? Put two words together and you’ve got a phrase, right? It’s actually a bit more complicated than that. Sometimes 1 + 1 = 1 where words are concerned. Certain word combinations are pronounced as a single word, and we call these compounds. Think of the different emphasis in the expressions The president lives in the White House and Pat lives in a white house. White House is a compound, and is emphasized on the first word, while white house in the second sentence is a phrase, and is emphasized on the word house, which is the “head” or main word of the phrase. Compounds are typically made by putting two nouns together, but other types of words can be used as well.

The Name Inspector counted names as phrases when they (1) followed the normal rules for putting together non-compound phrases (such as adjective + noun), or (2) broke those rules and had compound pronunciation. Things got tricky because some names that are syntactically phrases get pronounced as compounds. They’re kind of all run together. An example is Postacrime.com. “Post a crime” is actually a whole imperative sentence, and would normally be pronounced with emphasis on the word crime. But The Name Inspector assumes the name Postacrime is emphasized on the first syllable. Names like these went into the phrase category for syntactic reasons, but they might have been counted as compounds. (They were also counted as phrases in the TechCrunch post.)

Topping off the Seattle Startup index is Cheezburger Network, which is responsible for another website with a whole-sentence name, I Can Has Cheezburger. Then there’s Survey Analytics, BuddyTV, Robot Co-Op, ActiveRain, BigOven, the syntactically unusual HasOffers, and many others.

Seattle doesn’t favor phrase names at the expense of compounds, though. The old TechCrunch index was about 23% compounds, while the Seattle Startup Index is about 25%.There’s Wetpaint, Redfin, Smilebox, FlowPlay, Popshops, Walk Score, and many others. Seattle also makes a pretty good showing with blends, or names that seem like blends, which make up about 8% of the Seattle startup names versus 9% of the TechCrunch names: Zillow (zillions + pillow, though that analysis of the name might have been created after the name was), Feedjit (feed + widget, with a spelling twist), Sporcle (supposedly based on the word oracle–it’s got to be a blend with sparkle, right?), Mercent (merchant + percent?), and some others.

So what type of name does the Seattle Startup Index have fewer of? Real word names. Here’s what’s going on: TechCrunch covers mostly funded startups, which can afford to buy real-word domain names. About 25% of the names in the old TechCrunch index were real words, some with creative spelling. Real-word names make up only 12% of the names in the Seattle Startup Index. The Name Inspector doesn’t know how many companies in the Seattle index are bootstrapped, but he’s willing to guess it’s a lot. So our scrappy little bootstrapped startup scene has a different linguistic landscape than the one on TechCrunch. The need for economy forces us to be ingenious with all our resources, including our verbal ones. Go Seattle!

Have you noticed how many of these there are? In the TechCrunch index you can find Bridgevine, CrowdVine, Newsvine, Snapvine (now defunct), and SwingVine Inc. Other names The Name Inspector has come across include Comic Vine, LeadVine, Loudvine, PlaceVine, Racevine, RiotVine, Sandvine, and Widevine.

So what’s up? The Name Inspector believes that the -vine ending has become popular because it simultaneously meets four naming challenges, two more or less universal and two specific to web-based “connecting” tools such as communication services, aggregators, and social networks.

The first universal challenge is to find a name that evokes an appealing visual image. Vines are lovely, with their curly stems and foliage, and make a great visual design motif. The second is to find a word that combines well. Vine is great because it’s a single syllable with no clusters of multiple consonants.

Another more specific challenge is to evoke the idea of connection in a fresh way, avoiding words such as net and link. A vine makes a great visual metaphor for a network, with the leaves representing nodes and the stems representing edges. This metaphor is strengthened by the idiom “to hear something through the grapevine”, which uses the vine image to represent a network of friends and acquaintances.

The remaining challenge is to hint at the “organic” nature of social networks and crowdsourced recommendations and rankings–the way they grow through the complex actions of many people, not according to someone’s grand design. A vine is of course a plant, in keeping with the metaphor we evoke when we use the word organic that way.

The vine, thanks to its simple name, lovely appearance, and metaphorical potential, has flourished as a natural choice for namers. But has it perhaps begun to wilt?

If this post works out, The Name Inspector might just do a whole series of posts about naming trends in different startup centers, to add a comparative dimension. Ooh, that could be fun.

But for now, send your thoughts, Seattleites! Use the email address that appears under The Name Inspector’s pondering visage.

(The Name Inspector used to do this as a semi-regular feature, and then stopped. He’s going to try reviving it for a while, but this time, with words!)

While strolling down 1st Ave in Seattle, The Name Inspector was struck by the name of this cafe. Inside there were displays of what looked like traditional art of native Pacific Northwesterners. So the name is meant to evoke long-time inhabitants and the special relationship they develop to their land. But whoever named this place was unable to resist one of the most overused tropes of cafe-naming: punning on the word grounds. There are cafes called Common Grounds, Uncommon Grounds, Sufficient Grounds, and…well, you’ve seen these places, so think of some more yourself and don’t make The Name Inspector do all the work. He’s tired.

Anyway, there’s a problem with this name. Like all such names, it has two meanings: one that’s not related to coffee, and one that is. Usually the coffee-related interpretation is a positive one, as in Uncommon Grounds (uncommonly good, we mean!), or at least a neutral one, as in Sufficient Grounds (yes, we use enough coffee to brew your cup!). But Ancient Grounds makes it sound like they keep pouring water over the same coffee grounds again and again, and have been doing so for centuries. That just doesn’t promise a tasty cup of joe.

This is a name that might have great positive associations for some and leave the rest of us scratching our heads. Salal is the name of a shrub that’s popular in the Pacific Northwest. It has tough shiny leaves, pink blossoms in the spring, and edible purple berries in the late summer. (Actually, they’re technically fleshy sepals, or flower parts.) King County (the county where Seattle is) calls it “the single best ground cover for northwest gardens”. So, it might give gardeners a warm, fuzzy feeling. And the strange sound of the name might not seem so strange to people who are used to place names like Sammamish, Snoqualmie, Issaquah, and others that come from the original languages spoken in the Pacific Northwest.

The word salal is derived from Chinook Jargon, a trade language based on Chinook that was used widely in the Pacific Northwest in the 1800s. But if you’re not familiar with the plant, the name Salal is likely to seem like Arabic, as James Callan (@scarequotes) pointed out on Twitter. The Name Inspector, not much of a gardener himself, must confess to having been ignorant of the plant and puzzled by the name. Salal doesn’t appear to be an actual Arabic word, but there’s a municipality in Qatar called Umm Salal, and there are people with the surname Salal. The Arabic flavor of Salal seems to come from the sequence -al-, which is very common in transliterated Arabic, being one way to write the definite article (as in Al-Qaeda, which can be transated as ‘the base’). Also, after the vowel that appears twice in this word, the English /l/ sound gets velarized–pronounced in the back of the throat–which might remind people of the voiced velar and pharyngeal fricatives that English-hearing ears find so distinctive in Arabic.

This seems like a risky rename. Maybe the reference to a local plant is meant to make people in these parts feel like they’re part of a special in group. Others, however, will feel left out.

Now, The Name Inspector realizes he’s been a little absent lately. But remember, he’s been advancing the cause of traditional nonfiction book publishing. And all you have to do is find “The Name Inspector” on a conveniently alphabetized list, click a little radio button, and think nice thoughts. Then, no flowers or bottles of artisanal rye whiskey expected!

Because it’s been such a long time since The Name Inspector did his last post, he’ll make this a special one. He’ll give you the inside story of the naming of Gist, a Seattle company that connects your inbox to the web to give you information about the people and companies that are important to you. And all this told from the perspective of the hard-working naming consultant who proposed the name! This post will show you how a startup naming project can evolve over time and how different constraints make different results possible.

First, about Gist. If you haven’t tried it yet, you should. It’s an application that mines your email contacts, ranks them according to importance, and gathers information about them from all over the web: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. It’s especially useful in business–a sort of dashboard that instantly gives you the gist on all your most important contacts.

It all started back in 2007, when The Name Inspector was no bigger than–well, when he was just about exactly as tall as he is now. THIS tall. Anyway, a guy named T.A. McCann hired him to rename his company, which was called Minebox. That was a pretty apt name for a company that created software to datamine your email inbox. The problem with the name Minebox was that the .com domain wasn’t available. T.A. could only get mineboxx.com. And that seemed to The Name Inspector to be (1) a little tacky, (2) a little too suggestive of porn, and (3) a little too x-centric in a space where two of the main competitors were called Xobni and Xoopit (which as since been acquired by Yahoo).

The first round of work focused on other names relating specifically to the email inbox. An early name contender from this round was Plumbox. Surprisingly, the domain plumbox.com was available. (It’s not any more). There was a nice visual to go with the name–picture an old-fashioned produce crate filled with plums. A plum represents something valued (like a “plum job”), so the name made a great metaphor for an application that finds the value in your inbox. And finally, there was a great double meaning: a good alternative metaphor for “mining” an inbox would be to “plumb” an inbox (like “plumbing the depths”). Alas, Plumbox was not to be, because a Minebox investor was already involved with a similarly-named company.

So, round two. This round focused less specifically on the inbox. T.A. was beginning to envision a broader horizon of possibilities.  But there was still a belief that the .com domain should be available.

So, what do you do when you want the associations of a real word but you also want a short, available domain name? In classic Web 2.0 fashion, you get creative with your spelling. At one point, Dystyl was under consideration. However you feel about creative spelling (and The Name Inspector has mixed feelings about it), you have to admit that the name is interesting from an orthographic point of view. (And here’s an aside: naming isn’t a purely aesthetic pursuit. It’s also a type of problem solving.)

In any event, no one felt completely happy with Dystyl. It was too gimmicky.

Then we received word from the main investor, Mr. Big, that there was real money available to buy a domain name. That opened things up tremendously. Real-word names became a possibility without the creative spelling. When you’re looking for real-word names, you have to do a lot of scouting of web real estate, because almost any real English word you can think of has already been registered as a .com. You have to figure out what you might be able to buy. A domain name that has a major corporate website sitting on it is not going to be available for any price. A domain name that’s parked is very likely available for the right price. And when a domain name has a blog or other personal site or a very small business site on it, you can sometimes convince the owner to part with it.

So this round focused on real-word names with registered domains that didn’t seem entirely out of reach. The name Gist caught the attention of many people involved in the naming project, and the domain had belonged to a long-defunct website. The domain owner was contacted. After some polite but persistent prodding and some hard negotiation, the owner agreed to sell the domain. The final seal of approval came from Mr. Big himself, who weighed in saying the name was “not bad”. So Minebox becamse Gist.

The pithy, scrappy little name Gist came into a market where the best-known company was probably Xobni. If you don’t happen to notice that Xobni is inbox backwards, it simply functions as an arbitarary name. The initial X and final i make it exotic, like a foreign word, and that’s pretty much the extent of it. If you do know about the word inbox in there, then you know something about the application (that it has to do with email). But there are no other ideas introduced. This is an illustration of the principle that saying things too directly makes for a name with little conceptual resonance

One nice thing about the name Gist is that it demonstrates its own meaning. The gist of something is an economical expression or understanding of what’s important about it. The four-letter word gist was a very succinct expression of this very concept.

And if you’re interested in names, you can enjoy some English-based Asian brand names that are equally exotic. They’re mostly, but not exclusively, for Japanese products. The way English is used in these names is often shocking and amusing, so much so that there are websites, such as Engrish.com, devoted to showcasing Asian product names for laughs. Some of the names, like Pocari Sweat (for an “Ion Supply Drink”), you’ve probably come across before–they’ve been mentioned often enough in the media to have achieved a degree of notoriety. (Uwajimaya did indeed have big displays of Pocari Sweat right up near the cash registers.) There are other Asian-English names, though, that don’t have quite the same shock value, but that present English from a subtly different perspective. For a namer, these can be inspiring as well as funny.

Some of the names, like Watering KissMint chewing gum, are kind of poetic. No native speaker of American English would come up with this name. While KissMint alone is pretty normal, that present participle Watering makes the name special–it’s not an idiomatic use of the word water, and it suggests really sloppy kisses. The result is very evocative, though, and the unusual language is partly responsible. The Name Inspector gets the sense that watering is being used as a near-synonym for refreshing, but it evokes a more specific image of plants being watered, giving us a metaphorical way to see and feel our refreshment.

The gum with the charmingly literal name No Time apparently brushes your teeth while you chew it. Then there’s Walky Walky candy. Not shocking, not mind-blowing–just a little askew. It sounds  a bit like walkie talkie, or an ironic baby-talk command: “Come one now, everyone, walky-walky!”. And there’s a cold coffee drink called Let’s Be. You could imagine an American product going for a kind of Zen effect with a name like Just Be, but Let’s Be sounds a bit bizarre. Maybe the inclusive invitation of Let’s Be sounds more polite than the straightforward imperative form that’s ubiquitous in American branding and advertising. Come to think of it, the brand name of the little snack crabs mentioned above was Let’s Party! (Because nothing says “party” like a bag of little dried crabs!).

Other unusual beverage names included Sac Sac, a fruit juice drink, and amino supli, an apparent Pocari Sweat competitor.

In the Uwajimaya food court there’s a cream puff vendor called Beard Papa’s. Their logo includes a cartoon man-face with a fluffy white beard that looks liked whipped cream. Both the language of the name and the concept behind it are surprising. First, it’s just strange to modify papa with beard like that. Bearded papa would be the idiomatic way to say it. But more to the point, The Name Inspector is hard-pressed to think of a Western food product that’s touted, however subtly, for its resemblance to human hair. There’s angel hair pasta, of course, but that’s from angels, which, if they actually existed, would no doubt be quite delicious.

It’s hard not to have at least one laugh about an inappropriate name, and The Name Inspector got his from Chippy corn chips, which manages to be both unimaginative and way off the mark.

Browsing at Uwajimaya is like being a tourist without leaving the city center. Being in a foreign setting tends to heighten your sensitivity to all stimuli–even the familiar ones that are suddenly thrown into relief by an unfamiliar background. And so it was with The Name Inspector at Uwajimaya. One of the exotic Asian names he wrote down was Sport Beans candy. But then he looked more closely and realized this was a thoroughly American product, made by Ronald Reagan’s favorite jelly bean company Jelly Belly, headquartered in California, USA. Thank you, Uwajimaya, for helping The Name Inspector see the strangeness of American brand names through new eyes.

Speaking of the big time, The Name Inspector is pleased to announce that Lexiophiles has included this blog among the world’s Top 100 Language Blogs for 2009 (#28, to be specific). Thanks to those of you who voted! What’s more, The Name Inspector ranked #3 among blogs by language professionals. #1 and #2 are Separated by a Common Language and The Shifted Librarian, respectively. Fritinancy, a fellow namer’s blog and one of The Name Inspector’s faves, is #4. Given the arbitrary nature of such rankings, let’s call that a satisfying dead heat. The Top 100 list is heavily skewed toward blogs about language learning (which isn’t surprising, since that’s a focus of the Lexiophiles site), and doesn’t include such heavy hitters as Language Log, so it isn’t comprehensive. But The Name Inspector is honored nonetheless.

Watch out! There’s a new electric motorcycle in town. It’s the Enertia, from Brammo. Yes, like the word inertia, but with an E, which The Name Inspector supposes stands for electric. So, electric + inertia.

Inertia. Kind of an unusual word choice for a motorcycle, don’t you think? Inertia, as we all remember from physics class, is the tendency of a physical object to stay at rest or, if it’s in motion, to maintain direction and velocity until it’s acted upon by an external force. If you imagine a motorcycle in motion, you can think of inertia as a synonym for momentum: this thing will keep on going–just try to stop it! That seems to be what Brammo is going for. On the Enertia website they use the slogan “Enertia is Momentum for Change”.

The Name Inspector is willing to wager, however, that this is not the first idea that will pop into most people’s minds. They’ll think of the word inertia as it’s used in the everyday world, where it means, as the Merriam-Webster online dictionary puts it, “indisposition to motion, exertion, or change: INERTNESS”.

Inertia. Inertness. Stillness. Just sitting there. Not going anywhere. No energy or motivation. Lying on the couch, not doing what you’re supposed to be doing.

It’s actually hard to think of another name that so clearly communicates exactly the wrong message. Let’s face it, people are going to be skeptical about an electric motorcycle. They’re going to be concerned that it just won’t have enough oomph. Putting the word inertia in their minds isn’t going to help with that. The Name Inspector loves this quote from an otherwise rather positive review of the Enertia: “I cannot think of a more stupid name for a motorbike. I mean my bike cannot get over 35mph but because it is called the Ruckus I always feel something exciting might happen.”

Maybe the name Enertia is part of a daring, counterintuitive marketing concept. This is the motorcycle for people who don’t really like motorcycles! Or any form of transportation, or movement, really. Don’t worry, it’s electric. It only goes 51 mph, for Pete’s sake–just hop on! No, actually, get on carefully, holding on tight to the handlebars–but first make sure your helmet straps are properly adjusted. Now are you ready for the ride of your life? No? Good–don’t get too excited. This is really just a moped without the pedals–a noped. OK, ride carefully, and you’ll get there eventually if your battery doesn’t run out.

There. The Name Inspector just had to get that sarcastic little tirade out of his system. But it may not be far from the truth. In a 2007 interview for the Portland Tribune, Brammo design director Brian Wismann said the Enertia “was designed to appeal to somebody like me who has always loved motorcycles but perhaps was too intimidated to go out and buy one”. He also said it was made to be “really inviting to sit on”. Like a cool, zippy armchair!