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 […]

Paul Montgomery writes about his company’s name:
Tinfinger is intended to be to the Who’s Who what Wikipedia was to the
Encyclopedia Britannica. Its main function is a search engine of
biographical information on famous and semi-famous public figures. It
also has news aggregation features similar to Techmeme, based around
people’s names instead of hyperlink hierarchies.
The name Tinfinger is a […]

When The Name Inspector decided to go into business, the first book he bought was Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start. Why? Well, it did get great reviews on Amazon. But another factor was the poetic title. Not only does it rhyme, but the word art is orthographically and phonetically contained in the word […]

It’s probably safe to say that Amazon (or Amazon.com) has achieved the status of an iconic name.
So, does the word Amazon bear any meaningful relation to the company Amazon.com? Amazon is of course the name of the South American river which is the largest in the world. There were also ancient women warriors, made famous […]

A reader suggested doing a profile of this name, and The Name Inspector thought that was a pretty good idea.
The name Digg depends on felicitous ambiguity, of which The Name Inspector is something of a connoisseur. (He even wrote a dissertation about it, though the kind he focused on there was a bit different). What’s […]

What follows is a story from Dan McComb, one of the founders of Biznik, a Seattle-based social network for independent business people. Dan’s story is so well told that it’s quoted in its entirety here.
By the way, the Name Inspector gets a real kick out of the name Biznik, but, as a Biznik member who […]

PageFlakes shows how a quirky but vivid metaphor can make for a good name. In this case the name is for a customizable Ajax personal home page similar to Netvibes.
The quirky, one is almost tempted to say flaky, thing about this name is of course the word flakes. Flakes are insubstantial little things and not […]

The Name Inspector has a special interest in names for tech companies, and not just the ones you’ve already heard of. Names for startups also capture his imagination, and entrepreneurs have begun to send in their naming stories. Here’s a story from Ksenia Oustiougova, founder of Lilipip, which produces mobile educational video content for children:
I […]

Pandora is the character from Greek mythology who opened a jar (or box) and released evil and woe into the world. Doesn’t sound like good material for a name, does it? Isn’t calling a music service Pandora kind of like calling a women’s athletic shoe Incubus?
No, it’s not like that at all. When people think […]

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 […]