It’s been a while since The Name Inspector did a regular old post on a great name. So you know what’s a great name? Fab, that’s what. As in Fab.com, the daily-deal site that features art prints, t-shirts, jewelry, furniture, and other designy things. At a mere three letters, this name is the ultimate in [...]

The Seattle Startup Index is Seattle 2.0′s regular ranking of Seattle startups based on web traffic. The newest ranking is out, and The Name Inspector is delighted to see Zulily, a former client, at #4, just behind Cheezburger Network, BuddyTV, and Feedjit. Zulily has been burning up the track lately–just last month John Cook wrote at [...]

Brevity is a virtue in a name, usually. Come up with a short name that relates to your company or product in an imaginative way, and you’re golden. A sort of verbal minimalism is the goal of most naming efforts. Some names, however, succeed with a more…maximalist approach. Two extreme examples are the well-known full-sentence [...]

Who hasn’t had the frustrating experience of regretting having missed a big game that everyone talks about the next day? Actually, The Name Inspector hasn’t–for a reasonably sporty fellow he’s oddly immune to the normal enthusiasms of sports spectatorship. Don’t get him wrong, he can appreciate a well caught ball, an impressive defensive maneuver, or [...]

The Name Inspector was fortunate to have had the opportunity to help Zulily come up with their name. In case you haven’t checked it out, Zulily specializes in daily deals for moms, babies, and kids. The company offers amazing bargains and inspires great enthusiasm among its customers. The name Zulily, while odd to some, is loved [...]

Photo from Flickr by Stuart Seeger. Used under a Creative Commons 2.0 license. Remember a while back when The Name Inspector did a post about Seattle startup names, and promised a series of posts about names in other entrepreneurial hotspots? This is the next in that series: a little post about Austin startup names. To [...]

The Name Inspector has been thinkifying about naming fads lately. For example, there was that post a while back about names ending with the word vine. One trend that naggifies at him every day, though, is the gratuitous use of the suffix -ify. This one is bound to worsify before it gets bett…OK, he’s done [...]

The Name Inspector’s getting local. He’s decided to take a look at all 409 names in Seattle 2.0′s Seattle Startup Index. In his grand vision, this is the first in a series of posts about company names in different local startup scenes. Do entrepreneurs in Seattle do it differently from the ones in Boston or [...]

A few days ago John Cook reported that lawyers from job site Jobdango want the folks at Zoodango, a site that has nothing to do with jobs, to stop using the name Zoodango because the -dango ending infringes on Jobdango’s trademark. Zoodango CEO James Sun said they’d fight the trademark issue even though they’re changing [...]

The Name Inspector has recently learned about Lard Butt, a new athletic apparel company based here in Seattle. This is a great example of naming done right. First, there are the positive associations of lard, a filling and economical ingredient that makes fried foods taste great. The word lard also calls to mind larder, which [...]