The word awkwordplay is an especially silly example, and it’s made up. But the problem it demonstrates is found in a subtler form in many actual names. Consider the name Teensurance, for an insurance program for parents with teen drivers. Whenever you have a single-syllable word like teen in a blend, you’re going to want to give it some emphasis, especially when it expresses a distinguishing characteristic of something, as teen does in Teensurance. Yet in this name, teen replaces the first syllable of insurance, which isn’t emphasized. As a result, the name sounds strained. It’s an example of awkwordplay.

A similar example is the name Carticipate, for a mobile application to support ridesharing. Car is an important word in this name and deserves emphasis, but it replaces the unemphasized first syllable of participate.  Again, awkwordplay.

Contrast Teensurance and Carticipate with a well-constructed blend like Farecast, for an airfare forecasting service. The one-syllable word fare takes its rightful place as the emphasized syllable of the name, which preserves the rhythm of forecast as well.

Combine syllable emphasis mismatch with difficult or unpleasant transitions between sounds, and you’ve got a real mess. The name Mapufacture commits only a minor infraction with respect to syllable emphasis, because map replaces a syllable that receives secondary emphasis. But replacing a syllable with main emphasis would be much better. And, while the transition between the first and second syllable of manufacture sounds nice and smooth, when you replace the n with a p, the result sounds pretty bad.

An especially egregious example of awkwordplay is the name Syncplicity, for file synchronization and backup software. Pronouncing this name is not a matter of the utmost syncplicity. Not only is the word sync stripped of its natural emphasis, but there’s also that ugly consonant cluster between the first two syllables. As a result, the structure and sound symbolism of this name work directly against the intended message. The product is supposed to be about combining things simply, but the name combines things incompetently, and with great difficulty.

The lesson here, dear naming public, is that you shouldn’t jump on every coincidental syllable similarity you find to make a play on words. Sure, map sounds a little like the first syllable of manufacture, car rhymes with the first syllable of participate, teen shares a final sound with the first syllable of insurance, and sync sounds a bit like the first syllable of simplicity. But you’ve got to consider the overall rhythm and flow of your play on words. That means preserving the patterns of emphasized and unemphasized syllables that you find in the words you start with, and not creating ungainly new sound combinations.

Now go and play nice.

Tags: awkwordplay, wordplay, puns, teensurance, carticipate, mapufacture, syncplicity

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 political left and right. And it does automatic sentiment analysis to determine the “emotional charge” of the associated blog posts. It’s not even an actual product yet–it’s a research project. But here it is being discussed by Michael Arrington on TechCrunch, almost as if it were a web startup’s beta.

The problem with Blews is not the technology, which Arrington finds promising, but the name. In the slow old days, this in-house project name would probably never have made it into the wide world. But thanks to the web and influencers like Arrington, it threatens to become a brand.

Arrington is careful to point out that the creators of Blews are not UI experts or web designers, implying that readers should not judge the idea too harshly from a user experience perspective. The same sort of slack should be cut, The Name Inspector supposes, for the name. (A name is, after all, a part of the user experience. It might not affect the way a user decides where to click, but it affects the way a user remembers an app, thinks about it, bookmarks it, and tells others about it.)

So perhaps it’s not fair to pick nits. On the other hand, there’s a value to getting criticism early in the process, right?

This is a pretty bad name. Presumably it’s a blend: Blogs + news = Blews. It also alludes to the use of colors to represent the political spectrum: red for conservative and blue for liberal (and purple for those mixed-up areas). The GUI uses the colors red, white and blue in a way that makes it, as Arrington points out, a dead ringer for a sideways Rocket Pop.

But there are three big problems with the name Blews. First, people are likely to modify it with Microsoft, on the pattern of Microsoft Word. The result sounds like “Microsoft Blues”, which does make a pretty good name for the malaise experienced by the characters in Douglas Coupland’s novel Microserfs, before they started working at that virtual Lego startup in California and got all confident and fit and sexed up, but not for an innovative web technology from the software giant.

Second, there’s the unfortunate but inevitable evocation of the phrase “Microsoft blows” (or the slightly less negative “Microsoft blew”, which at least leaves open the possibility that Microsoft no longer blows). Some TechCrunch commenters picked right up on that.

Third, Blews looks like a violation of grammar: a third person singular present tense ending stuck onto an irregular past tense verb. It’s the linguistic equivalent of biting on tinfoil.

Let The Name Inspector make it clear that he finds nothing less interesting than gratuitous Microsoft bashing. He knows nice, smart people who work there. He’s just saying that it’s a mistake to give the haters this kind of raw material. The Name Inspector stands always at the ready to help people avoid this kind of situation.

Tags: blews, the name blews, microsoft blews, the name microsoft blews, microserfs, coupland, douglas coupland, legos, sentiment analysis

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 surfing the web on your mobile phone.

While mingling at a Seattle tech event, The Name Inspector met a fellow from the company who gave a little demo, and it was pretty cool. The Zumobi interface divides the screen of your phone into four quadrants, and each of those contains four quadrants, so there are sixteen little boxes altogether. Each box contains a rectangular icon, called a tile, that represents a website, a feed, or some other little piece of web content. As you might guess from the term Zooming User Interface, you use Zumobi by zooming in and out on the quadrants and selecting tiles. If you know what you’re doing, like this guy did, you can do it really fast–zooming in the speedy sense.

The name ZenZui probably made the zen connection to evoke the sense of calm mastery that the interface provides. The -Zui ending came from the generic descriptive term for the interface, but made the whole name seem like an exotic foreign word. Maybe a little too exotic. In a BlogTalkRadio interview at Mobile Internet World, Senior Marketing Manager Beth Goza said that “zui, meaning ‘Zooming User Interface’, hasn’t really taken off for the average joe”. She also said that “zen is a pretty crowded space”. So the name change was spurred by a need for both clarity and distinctiveness.

Cindy Spodek Dickey, VP of Marketing for Zumobi, says that the idea for the name change came from several sources, including partners and end users. “Everyone agreed that ZenZui was a ‘cool’ name,” she wrote in an email, “but that a name with zen was an ambiguous product space (restaurants, spas, liquor, electronics to name a few) and didn’t fully communicate what our unique product was truly about…our zooming user interface and mobility focus. (Zoom + mobile = Zumobi)”. The new name was the result of brainstorming among management and employees.

Since the introduction of the .mobi internet domain, mobi has perhaps become generally recognized as a shortened form of mobile, so Zumobi might be thought of as essentially two words stuck together, with a spelling tweak. It’s a blend rather than a compound, because it’s pronounced with the stress pattern of a single word, and the m serves a double function as the last sound of zoom and the first sound of mobi.

The Name Inspector believes that Zumobi is a definite improvement over ZenZui, though without the double Zs it’s not as visually distinctive. Zumobi does indeed evoke the product’s special qualities more effectively. It’s more descriptive than suggestive, but that’s OK for a new, unusual product that’s so clearly characterized by a single salient feature. Zumobi is easy and fun to say. And it has that most important and elusive of qualities–the domain was available.

Tags: zumobi, the name zumobi, zenzui, the name zenzui, zooming user interface, zui, zooming, mobile, mobile platform, mobile phone

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 central gathering spot for the “spiritually curious.”

This is a good question. Though duty compels The Name Inspector to pick one nit: dango is not a word. It seems to have become what linguists sometimes call a cranberry morpheme.

So what in tarnation is a cranberry morpheme? Basically, it’s what you get if you chop a meaningful part off a word and there’s a meaningless part left. If you take the word cranberry and chop off berry, you’re left with cran. That’s a cranberry morpheme. That cran chunk seems like it should mean something, because it’s kind of like the blue in blueberry, the goose in gooseberry, or the cloud in cloudberry. But it doesn’t. It just distinguishes cranberries from other types of berry. Cranberry morphemes can often be traced back to meaningful elements etymologically, but are not meaningful for contemporary speakers. Or at least, not at first.

What makes -dango a cranberry morpheme? As WordzGuy observed back in January 2006, with Benjamin Zimmer following up in Language Log, the recent use of -dango seems to have started with the name Fandango, for the internet movie ticket service. Fandango is a type of punning company name based on a real word that bears little relation to the company in question, but that happens to contain a smaller word that is related. Fandango is the name of a dance, but it contains the word fan, as in movie fan. When you chop off fan, you’re left with dango.

If people are able to agree on a meaning to assign to a cranberry morpheme, it can be used to form new words. We now have cran-apple and cran-grape juices as well as cranberry juice, so cran by itself has come to stand for the flavor of cranberry.

Now something similar is happening with dango. WordzGuy identified flame-dango and Jobdango as examples of novel uses of the -dango ending of the word fandango. Benjamin Zimmer added to those fundango and blogdango. Now we have Zoodango and, heaven help us, GodDango to add to the list. It’s not clear that -dango has a consistent meaning in all these. In the company names Jobdango, Zoodango, and GodDango, The Name Inspector assumes that -dango simply means ‘innovative commercial website’.

Tags: fandango, the name fandango, dango, jobdango, zoodango, goddango

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 already) that the conference is run by Lockergnome, the brand under which net entrepreneur Chris Pirillo and his associates do all their stuff. That’s where the Gnome- part comes from. The -dex part, of course, is a reference to COMDEX, a big computer trade show that took place every year between 1979 and 2003. COMDEX got too big and then hurt feelings in the media world in 1999 when it made its press admission criteria overly exclusive, and has never recovered from the resulting backlash. It’s currently in a state of limbo.

COMDEX stands for Computer Dealers’ Exposition. That makes it a hybrid letter/syllable acronym:

COM (syllable) + D (letter) + EX (syllable)

The name Gnomedex can be thought of as a blend of Lockergnome + COMDEX. Because Gnomedex does not, unfortunately, mean ‘Gnome Dealers’ Exposition’, the ending -dex in this name has lost its acronymical (yes, that’s a completely made-up word) function and is only used to set up an analogy to COMDEX.

Gnomedex makes that allusion both to show that it’s the name of a conference and to distinguish that conference from the fallen trade show. Gnomedex is what COMDEX was not: small, a bit loosely organized, and focused on attendees and not at all on vendors. It’s a bold and interesting naming strategy, evoking something negative in order to distinguish yourself from it. We also see this strategy in the name YouTube, which plays on the derogatory term boob tube to distinguish itself from ordinary TV. The strategy might be summed up as, “This is in the same category as X, but it’s in a class by itself”. And Gnomedex is indeed–it’s a strong brand in the technology world. Lots of people, The Name Inspector included, think of it as one of the most interesting tech conferences around.

Gnomedex is a funny name. There’s something absurd about the word gnome, and using it to replace the first syllable of a stuffy, corporate-sounding acronym really makes Gnomedex work. Gnome makes you think of garden gnomes. And the Underpants Gnomes of South Park. They have a three-point business plan that may seem eerily familiar to you VCs and angels out there, and cut a little close to the bone for you web entrepreneurs:

1. Collect Underpants.
2. ?
3. Profit!

Chris probably had a more thunk-out business plan when he started Lockergnome.

The Gnome-substitution works well phonetically. Gnome is just similar enough to Com- to make Gnomedex sound natural, but just different enough to make Gnomedex subtler than a pun.

So where does the name Lockergnome come from? It’s a slight tweak of The Locker Gnome, a nickname that Chris gave himself in high school that relates to one of his physical characteristics. Let’s just say that what Chris more than makes up for in professional stature, he lacks in physical stature. As he says in his history of Lockergnome, people, including his own writing teacher, used to call him “shorty names” such as gnome. One day when Chris was standing by his locker, The Locker Gnome just came to him. Chris insists that he was never actually stuffed into a locker.

[where: 98121]

Tags: gnomedex, gnomedex7, gnomedex2007, lockergnome, chris pirillo, seattle, gnomes, underpants gnomes

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. Have you heard about the promotional stunt for the upcoming Simpsons movie? Twelve 7-Eleven stores in the U.S. have been transformed into Kwik-E-Marts, and carry real versions of the products sold by the fictitious convenience store in the animated series. You can buy a six-pack of Buzz Cola, a box of Frosted KrustyO’s cereal, or a Radioactive Man comic book.

But back to Fabjectory. This is one of the more linguistically complicated names that The Name Inspector has come across (it rivals Bare Escentuals, but is more interesting and less groanworthy). It’s not only a blend name–it’s a double blend! As Mike explains on his blog, It’s made out of the words fabject and factory. But of course, you may not have known that fabject was a word. That’s because it was only coined a few years ago by science fiction author and technology observer Bruce Sterling.

Fabject is a blend of fabricated and object, and refers to a new type of thing created by relatively inexpensive “3D printing” or “rapid prototyping” machines. These things can take a 3D digital model and squirt together thin layers of plastic goop or powder that hardens to make solid objects.

While commercial fabbers, as they’re called, still cost tens of thousands, they’re bound to come down in price, and there’s a community of fab fans who use and promote inexpensive fabbers made from open source kits. Sterling, always a visionary, has given us a new word for something that may become as commonplace as printed documents.

So the whole structure of the name Fabjectory is something like this (the underlined letters show where the pieces overlap):

[ [ Fabricated + object ] + factory ] = Fabjectory

Whew! An additional dimension comes into play when you realize that -jectory evokes the word trajectory, suggesting forceful forward motion and, metaphorically, the future. There’s also the coincidence of fabject starting with the same letter as factory, so that it also seems like the word factory has just been stretched out a bit.

One downside of the name is the fact that, orthographically, it includes the word abject (as in abject poverty), which means something like ‘low, degraded’. Since abject is stressed on the first syllable, though, and the name Fabjectory has its primary emphasis on the -jec- part, this association is pretty weak.

This is not the most elegant name in the world, but it works surprisingly well considering its complexity. Somehow the jointed quality of the name fits the idea of making, fabricating, manufacturing. Given the ever-increasing difficulty of finding available TLD domain names, this kind of multi-layered name might be the future of naming.

Tags: fabjectory, the name fabjectory, fabber, fabbers, fabbing, fab, rapid prototyping, 3D printing, 3D printers, bruce sterling

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 this is a kind of a blend, but a rather unusual one.

What makes Skype unusual? First, while sky peer-to-peer is an extremely descriptive name for a peer-to-peer telephony service that works worldwide, the -pe portion of Skype is almost impossible to associate with peer-to-peer unless you’re told to. So Skype is really more like a tweak of the word sky. When looked at that way, the name is still unusual because the addition of a single consonant to the end of a word (The Name Inspector is talking about the pronunciation here, not the spelling) is a very uncommon naming strategy. No tweaked word names on the TechCrunch index list or the alternative search engine list are derived that way.

For that reason, some people might interpret Skype as a more conventional blend of sky with something that rhymes with Skype, like hype–or pipe, ripe, type, wipe. etc. Of these, pipe is the most positive association that’s at all relevant. But why the word sky? Well, aside from the general positive associations (sunshine, heaven, height=excellence/goodness, etc.), it seems to be a metonymic reference to communication signals as they exist in the popular imagination–flying around in the air. Since this is internet telephony we’re talking about, however, it seems just as likely that the signals would be flying around in cables of various kinds.

Another notable thing about Skype is its historical origin. Like many common English words that begin with sk- (e.g. skill, skin, skirt), sky has its roots in Old Norse. Maybe that’s one reason the Scandinavian founders chose this word for their company name. This distinctly Germanic provenance actually makes Skype stand out a little in the crowd of tech names, which tend, like scientific terms, to be derived at least partly from Latin or Greek. It gives Skype a basic and old quality, which is enhanced by the fact that the name is a single strong syllable.

The simplicity of the name Skype is its greatest asset. It makes the technology seem like a basic necessity that no one should do without, like a desk, a plate, a sink, or some other everyday item with a one-syllable name. It’s almost as if someone discovered a short and useful but long-forgotten English word and reclaimed it. That’s really quite a naming achievement.

Tags: skype, the name skype, skyper, sky peer-to-peer, sky, telephony, internet telephony, VoIP, etymology, Germanic, Old Norse

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 with the name. Zillow is a blend (or, to be old-fashioned and French about it, a portmanteau) of zillions (as in “zillions of data points”) and pillow (a metonymic reference to home–where you rest your head).

Because blend names are based on real words, they often have a familiar ring to them. They can be especially seamless and elegant when, as in this name, they overlap through rhyming syllables.

Zillow adds an unusual first letter and sound z to an unusual and especially mellow-sounding word ending -illow. The only common two-syllable words that the Name Inspector can think of right now that share that ending are pillow, willow, and billow. Willow regularly shows up on lists of the most beautiful-sounding English words. Two qualities that make it beautiful are its symmetry (beginning and ending with w) and its high sonority (that is, its lack of sounds that obstruct the flow of air through the vocal tract). Both qualities are diminished when the z replaces the w, but the name still sounds pretty good. The Z is distinctive, but the company goes overboard applying it to other names for specific services: Zillow alone says “cool”, but Zindex and Zestimate tagging along say “zzz”.

Because both zill- and -illow are unusual word-halves and don’t evoke many competing meanings, Zillow brings to mind zillion and pillow surprisingly well. Even if you don’t get the “right” association for -illow, you’re bound to get an appropriate one: willow suggests yards or gardens, and billow suggests sailboats and, by association, wealth. Not bad.

Tags: Zillow, the name Zillow, Zindex, Zestimate, real estate