Someone should write about the name Pinterest. Pause. Don’t you think someone should write about Pinterest? Pause. OK, it looks like The Name Inspector is going to have to do it. Pause. Sometimes it seems like he’s the only one who ever does any name inspecting around here. Pinterest, like Groupon, is one of those [...]

The word awkwordplay, which The Name Inspector has just coined, demonstrates what it means: awkward wordplay. A play on words can be awkward for different reasons, and awkwordplay shows one of the most common reasons: a mismatch in syllable emphasis. Awkwordplay is a blend based on the phonetic overlap between the last syllable of awkward [...]

Word travels fast on the web. That can be a big boon to a business, but it has its down side as well. Consider Blews. This is the name of a news aggregator being developed at Microsoft Research. It not only displays news stories, but also shows how much they’re being discussed in blogs from [...]

The Seattle-based mobile platform company ZenZui recently changed its name to Zumobi, in preparation for a beta release in December. The name ZenZui was based on the word zen plus the acronym zui, which stands for ‘Zooming User Interface’. That’s the technology, developed at Microsoft Research, that Zumobi claims will take the pain out of [...]

Last week John Cook at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer asked: What is it with the word ‘dango’ and internet companies?. Of course, there’s the online movie site Fandango. And then there’s Portland’s Jobdango and Seattle’s Zoodango. Now, a former Microsoft project manager is rolling out a new site called GodDango, which he hopes will become a [...]

Next week The Name Inspector will be attending Gnomedex, a technology conference/unconference that happens in Seattle. (If you’re also going to be there, come find The Name Inspector and say hi.) That makes this a great time to write about the name Gnomedex. To understand this name, you first need to know (if you don’t [...]

Several months ago Mike Buckbee told The Name Inspector about his startup named Fabjectory. It will take a 3D digital representation of your Nintendo Mii or SecondLife avatar, or a 3D model you create yourself with SketchUp, and turn it into an actual physical object. Making the virtual real seems to be a new trend. [...]

The name Skype combines the familiar and the peculiar. Though there’s that unmistakable word sky in there, the end of the name is a bit of a mystery. On the Skype forum, an employee reveals that the name was derived from the expression sky peer-to-peer, which was shortened to Skyper and then to Skype. So [...]

As a denizen of the Emerald City, the Name Inspector has been intrigued by the meteoric rise of the online real estate service Zillow, and has speculated on the origins of their name. Those speculations, though enjoyable, have turned out to be pointless, because it says right there on their website how they came up [...]