Naming is one challenge that many people find baffling, and naming rules abound in blogs, books, and magazine articles. The rules are often stated in uncompromising terms that make them easy to follow with minimal thought. Today The Name Inspector wants to talk about some of those rules and why they’re dumb.

1. Your domain name should have no more than six letters

Some rules are bad because they continue to be passed around after they become obsolete. The myth of the six-letter domain name is one of those rules. The Name Inspector doesn’t know how it got started, but he  found something like it in writing. A Microsoft publication called Managing Your E-Commerce Business, Second Edition has the following guideline:

The perfect domain name is less than six letters long, followed by .com or some other suffix. Short domain names are easier to remember and type. However, let’s be realistic: Fewer and fewer one-word domain names are left with each passing hour.

That was written in 2001, but you’ll still find people talking about how domain names are ideally no more than six letters long. Sometimes they point to a bunch of prominent names like eBay, Yahoo, Google, Amazon, etc. as “proof” of this idea. But anyone who has tried to find a good domain name in the last five years or so knows that the six-letter limit is unrealistic. The five-letter limit urged in the passage above is now laughable. Some companies, like Biznik, do manage to find great six-letter domains, but they’re the lucky exceptions.

There’s some truth to the idea that short domain names are more memorable than long ones, but it’s not a matter of counting letters. The name ICanHasCheezBurger.com is far more memorable than the name jfhpnx.com, even though the former has eighteen letters and the latter has only six. Memorability depends on the units being remembered. Meaningful phrases are more memorable than random sequences of letters, for example.

While it’s true that there are several big names on the web that have six or fewer letters, there are plenty of popular sites that have longer domain names. The following sites are all in the Alexa Top 100:  YouTube (7 letters), FaceBook (8 letters), Wikipedia (9 letters), Craigslist (10 letters), Photobucket (11 letters), and even Adultfriendfinder (17 letters). What these names have in common is that they consist of familiar parts put together (except Wikipedia, which was named before anyone knew what wiki meant).

So when you’re trying to come up with a domain name, you want to keep reasonably short, but you might also want to make it meaningful. If that’s your goal, don’t worry about arbitrary letter limits.

2. A name should be an empty vessel

You’ll hear a lot of marketing people say that a name should be an “empty vessel”. Hardly anyone gives a coherent explanation of the term, though. Here’s a statement taken from the website of Heckler Associates, the esteemed Seattle branding agency that came up with the name Starbucks:

Unique brand names serve as relevant ‘empty vessels,’ their meaning filled entirely by brand equity. Brand names that embrace market trends and conventions or associate too closely to common words signal a follower’s position. They reduce the opportunity for distinction, limit assimilation of your brand values, and make legal protection difficult.

The phrase “their meaning filled entirely by brand equity” implies that an empy vessel has no meaning. But what counts as meaning? Heckler came up with the name Cinnabon, which clearly resembles the phrase cinnamon bun. That’s not meaning? Do they mean the name doesn’t appear verbatim in the dictionary? If so, they should say that. The image of an empty vessel is a terrible way to get that point across. Cinnabon does not get all its meaning from brand equity. It gets most of its meaning from its resemblance to the phrase cinnamon bun. The first time The Name Inspector saw one of these places in an airport, he thought to himself, “Huh, I guess they sell cinnamon buns”. Cinnabon is about as descriptive as a name can be.

So it’s really unclear what marketing people are getting at when they talk about this empty vessel stuff. One thing they mean is that a name shouldn’t limit a company too strictly to one area of business, lest it make future diversification difficult. That’s a legitimate concern. But it has nothing to do with a name being devoid of meaning.

When  you talk about the “meanings” of a name, you really have to consider two things. First there are meanings of the word(s) that the name is based on. Then there’s the way those meanings relate to the company, product, or service the name stands for. Some names based on real words, like Internation Business Machines, are essentially literal descriptions and can indeed be limiting. Other names based on real words, like Apple, evoke concepts that relate only imaginatively to what the names stand for. Two very different kinds of name, neither devoid of meaning.

So, there are three problems with the “empty vessel” idea: (1) no one explains clearly what it means, (2) actual naming practice doesn’t seem to follow the dictate of the empty vessel, and (3) this way of talking about meaning completely misses the crucial role of context.

Meaning is good. Meaning is your friend. You just have to use it imaginatively. Forget the empty vessel.

3. Your name should yield almost no results in Google

This rule is proposed by Seth Godin in his post The New Rules of Naming. It’s based entirely on the idea that customers will find a company’s website by typing the company’s name into a search engine. It is important to be findable in that way. But to be found on Google, what you really need is to be the first search result. The rest don’t matter for findability purposes. If you own yourcompanyname.com, then you’re already halfway there.

There’s another important way potential customers use web searches: to learn about the credibility and reputation of a company before becoming actual customers. If you search on a company’s name and their site doesn’t turn up as the first result, you might think the company lacks legitimacy. If the first several results aren’t web pages that mention the company, you might think the company is small potatoes. Godin’s rule will help a company avoid these situations. But it’s overkill to say a name  should only yield a few results in Google before you start using it. What’s really important is that you be able to dominate the top ten or so results for a search on your name. Results after that will probably be ignored by web searchers. So what matters is not so much the number of results you get for a search on a potential name, but how much “Google juice” those results have to compete with you, should you decide to use the name.

Let’s amend Seth’s rule: It’s a good idea to choose a name that will allow you to dominate the first page of search results on Google (and other search engines, of course). That means not having too much competition from popular websites.

4. Your name should start with a letter near the beginning of the alphabet

Guy Kawasaki promotes this rule in his book The Art of the Start. It’s a pretty old-school rule, based on the idea that you want to appear early in alphabetical listings like the phone book or a list of conference vendors. Again, the validity of this rule really depends on the situation. How much of your business do you expect to get from the phone book or from conference attendees? How much do you expect to get from web search, word-of-mouth, and advertising? If you’re relying more on the latter, message and memorability are way more important than what letter your name starts with.

5. Your name should begin with/contain the letter(s) __.

Experts often tell you that your name should ideally start with or contain a certain letter.

From the website of KaZaK Composites:

While visiting Sony in Japan, Dr. Fanucci [that's the founder] attended a presentation on the principles of choosing a good corporate name. There he learned what makes a good company name, including that it should include the letters k, z and x.

Who was that mysterious “expert” giving bogus naming advice in Japan?

The branding professionals at Shift Partners suggest that a company name should begin with the letter V.

Now, The Name Inspector is obviously in favor of being sensitive to the nuances of words, sounds, and even letters. But people, there are no magic letters. Worry about things that matter first, like whether your name evokes ideas that help your brand.

6. Names of such-and-such a type are bad

The company Brains on Fire sometimes advertises itself this way in Google search ads:

No Latin roots. No mashed together words. Names that mean something.

The Name Inspector has already made it pretty clear that he loves meaning, so he doesn’t object to that last sentence. It’s the first two that are puzzling. Surely the folks at Brains on Fire don’t actually avoid using any words based on Latin in their names. They’re probably talking about avoiding a certain naming style that was popular in the 1990s–the one that gave us names like Acura Integra. Fair enough. But no mashed together words? Does that mean no blends, like Viralmentalist or Fiskateers? Wait, those names came out of Brains On Fire projects. Do they mean no compounds, like IndieBound? Oh, that’s a name they came up with. So what does their ad mean, exactly?

Linguistically speaking, there are only so many ways to create a name. The Name Inspector can’t understand why anyone would want to take perfectly serviceable types of name off the table. It’s already hard enough to come up with a good, meaningful name.

The bottom line: when naming, you can follow simple rules that will get you nowhere, or you can do the hard work of using language creatively to help people see your company, product, or service in the best and most interesting way.

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

While perusing the children’s section of a local used bookstore, The Name Inspector came across a lovely book that’s basically about naming. He was as surprised as you are.

The book, first published in 1958, is Ounce Dice Trice. It was written by Alastair Reid and beautifully illustrated by the artist Ben Shahn. Reid is a poet, and the book is based on a notebook of words that he kept for a number of years.

OK, the book is more about words and their poetic properties than it is about naming per se. But it does contain this passage:

It is most important to be a good namer, since it falls to all of us at some time or other to name anything from a canary to a castle, and since names generally have to last a long time. Here are some possible names for possible things, to give you ideas.

It continues with lists of suggested names for elephants, cats, insects, whales, houses and places, and other things.

The connection between naming and poetry is strong. Naming lore, to the extent that such a thing exists, includes the story of a correspondence that took place in the 1950s between the Ford Motor Company and the poet Marianne Moore about naming what was eventually called the Edsel. In case you’re not too up on your modern poets, you might remember Moore for her widely anthologized poem “Poetry”, which begins with the perfectly disarming line “I, too, dislike it”. There’s another turn of phrase, which The Name Inspector has not been able to get out of his mind since high school, about poets inventing “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”.

Anyway, Moore, perhaps not taking her role as namer entirely seriously, suggested names like Mongoose Civique and Utopian Turtletop.

What’s especially interesting about the lists in Ounce Dice Trice is the way they demonstrate different aspects of sound symbolism, a topic that comes up from time to time in this blog. Suggested names for insects include Twilliter, Limlet, Tilltin, Legliddy, and Tristram. Notice the preponderance of sounds produced lightly with the tip of the tongue behind the front teeth: t, l, r, n, d. Notice also how often the short, high vowel found in the word pin makes an appearance. All these sounds suggest smallness and lightness.

Another aspect of sound symbolism that hasn’t been discussed much here is the way a consonant cluster can suggest certain ideas due to its strong association with the beginning of a particular word or cluster of words. One example is the sense of quick motion evoked by the consonant cluster fl-, as in flip, flit, flick, flicker, flutter, etc. Another is the “squishiness” of the squ- words in the illustration above.

Sound symbolism is an important tool for namers, poets, and poets acting as namers, and The Name Inspector is delighted to have been given a chance to show such a great drawing in his post.

Tags: ounce dice trice, alastair reid, ben shahn, poetry, poet, marianne moore, toad, squid, edsel, ford motor company, ford, mongoose civique, utopian turtletop

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

TrenchMice is was a site where people can share inside scoops about the companies where they work. Trenchmouse John has written a great post about how they came up with the name TrenchMice. This is one of the best, most thorough naming stories that The Name Inspector has come across.

John wrote the post in response to a comment he had received about why TrenchMice gets so much less traffic than Guy Kawasaki’s site Truemors. The commenter suggested that it might have to do with the branding: people don’t want to be associated with mice, because timid rodents do not represent professional aspiration well.

Now, The Name Inspector can see the commenter’s point, but has a hard time believing that the name TrenchMice is being unfavorably compared to Truemors–he’s already been in contact with Guy about how Truemors sounds way too much like tumors. Don’t you think Truemors might get a lot of traffic because Guy Kawasaki has one of the most popular blogs on the planet?

But on to John’s post. You should definitely read the whole thing, but here’s a passage about the list of names they first came up with that really struck a chord with The Name Inspector:

What’s interesting is how unsuitable all of these names were, even though we were trying very hard to come up with a deliberately on-target name. It’s as though the actions of trying to be on-target kept us locked in uncreative names. All of these name categories had names we didn’t like, but the “on target” names were uniformly uninteresting.

This is such an important point. Before John even brought it up, The Name Inspector had been working on an analogy to illustrate it. Here it is:

Naming a company is like taking a picture of a house. Being too descriptively “on-target” is like standing right next to the house, or even inside it. To get a good shot, you really need to step away, walk around, and find just the right angle. Ideally, you’ll get interesting details in the background and/or foreground that show something about the neighborhood.

All this does not mean that your name should have nothing to do with your company. Forget that “empty vessel” stuff–most good names are not empty vessels, they’re just indirect. TrenchMice works because it offers a vivid image that’s useful for thinking about anonymous sources of inside information about a competitive world. The Name Inspector doesn’t believe that people using the site would have so much invested in the metaphor that they’d feel like mice themselves. The name TrenchMice is funny, extremely apt, and very memorable. Maybe the World War I allusion is a touch grim, but that’s part of the point of the name. It’s tough out there in the trenches.

Thanks for your very illuminating post, John.

UPDATE 5/29/2010: TrenchMice, alas, ceased to be some time ago. The blog post link above takes you to an archived version of the post. Thanks to John Humphrey for providing the link in his comment below.

Tags: trenchmice, the name trenchmice, truemors, rumors, scoops, companies, company info, company scoops

Last month Rogelio Bernal Andreo shared this naming story with The Name Inspector:

The story of coRank is a bit unusual. Back early last year I was thinking of launching a couple of services and wasn’t sure what name to pick (you know how “easy” is to grab a decent .com these days), so I ended up grabbing coRank.com and coTrack.com.

Then I got busy and those services (that were RSS feed related) never materialized.

Then I came with the idea of what coRank is today: a web-based service that would alow anyone to create their own social news network, or, in simple terms, their own Digg-like service (I try to stay away from using the clone term, as I think we have a different goal than just enabling people to create Digg clones, although it’s the easiest way people understand what coRank is about).

So then we started to look for a good .com name for the service. And we searched, and searched, and visited sedo.com 10 times a day, etc. And we were like that for 2-3 weeks until it struck me: “Wait a sec, I already have coRank.com, I have no use for it, and the name seems to me to be perfect for a service like this one!” coRank - cooperative ranking, people ranking things in a cooperative fashion, etc… It made sense and so we went for it.

And that’s the unusual part of it. I’m sure this is not the first site for which the name had been registered even before the idea came up and when the idea came, we weren’t trying to give a service to a name, but there probably aren’t many cases where this happened, and the name and idea actually married so well

This is a pretty funny coincidence. The name coRank is almost too descriptive, as if Rogelio had not traveled far enough in the naming process. But in fact he traveled a great distance, and ended up with a name that he created before his web app had even been conceived. Is it possible, Rogelio, that you got the idea for your app from the name?

Probably not.

While The Name Inspector often discourages people from using names that are too literally descriptive, in some cases they’re appropriate. This is one of those cases. Descriptive names often work when what you’re naming (a company, a product, a service) doesn’t fall into any recognized category and people need help understanding what you’re up to. That’s almost what’s going on here. Well, actually this case is a bit more complicated than that. coRank is in danger of falling into the category “Digg clone”–that is, of being defined in terms of one particular more prominent web app. If it had a suggestive name like Digg, it might have more trouble escaping the clone label. The name coRank stands out for being more descriptive of a Digg-like service than even the name Digg is. So it works pretty well even though it’s not the most colorful and interesting name in the world. It’s easy to pronounce and understand, and it gets poetic symmetry from the initial and final [k] sounds.

Thanks for your story, Rogelio. Congratulations on finding a use for that name you had sitting around, and good luck with the business.

Tags: corank, the name corank, digg, social network, social news

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

Tags: seattle 2.0, seattle2.0, marcelo calbucci, marcelocalbucci, sampa, naming primer

While we’re on the subject of tooting one’s own horn, The Name Inspector would like to call everyone’s attention to an upcoming event that all independent (and independent-minded) businesspeople of the Pacific Northwest should attend: BizJam. It’s happening on June 9, and it’s organized by the good folks at Biznik, so it’s bound to be truly fun, interesting, and useful. The Name Inspector will be be speaking about “How to choose the perfect name for your business”. Head Bizniks Dan McComb and Lara Eve Feltin have done an impressive job of fostering an independent business community in Seattle and initiating and promoting great events. If you miss this one you’ll hear about it later and be sorry.

Tags: biznik, bizjam, seattlebizjam, consulting, name consulting, naming consulting, name consultant, naming consultant

A while ago Allegra Searle-LeBel sent in a story about naming her online media-editing startup:

We had been struggling for about 2 months, trying to find the right name. There was this funny, almost mystical sense that it existed *somewhere*. We just needed to keep slogging through the troughs of lame options and almost good enough ideas. I tried combining different parts of my name with words describing our services or industry (BlissArt, MadriGal, DisinterMedia, FemMediate). Terrible and incessant variations on terrible. Not all of them were so bad; some of them would have been good enough. But I didn’t want to have just an okay name. I wanted one that felt right. That rolled off the tongue. That was easy to spell. That had meaning. Eventually, naming showed up on the list of milestones that had to be accomplished in order to further the work. I wrangled all day, learned more about the domain drop process, bought some domains that were “good enough”. I went to bed glad to have chosen something, but still unsettled. I dreamed of standing in a crowd with names being called out to me. I felt happy! I liked them! In the morning, I checked the domains, I checked Google, I laughed at the simplicity. Limber Media, Inc. Now the fun is coming up with slick soundbites, right…? “LimberMedia.com, For anyone who is overextended.”

Limber Media is a nice, mellifluous name. There’s a poetically symmetrical pattern in the consonants, from alveolar (produced with the tongue behind the top front teeth) to bilabial nasal to bilabial stop and then back to bilabial nasal and then alveolar again. And see how the phonetic representation is so pale? That shows what high sonority this name has. There’s uninterrupted voicing–vibration of the vocal folds–when you say the name, and three of the five consonants are sonorants–they allow an unimpeded flow of air and do not introduce noisy turbulence to the speech signal. These qualities provide sound-symbolic support for the idea of limberness (or suppleness or flexibility or something like that).

How does limberness relate to online media editing? Limberness is of course a property of people, not web applications. But, if you think of the users of the application as limber, the implication is that they’re able to move and bend freely with no constraints imposed by their own bodies. This idea of unimpeded motion can apply metaphorically to any kind of human task, suggesting that it can be accomplished easily. The metaphor works similarly if it applies to a personification of the company or its web app. The idea of limberness also makes a nice connection between the company and its founder, who is a choreographer and dancer as well as a web entrepreneur. Limberness also evokes the more general concept of flexibility, which can apply to objects and materials as well as people. A flexible medium is one that is easily manipulated, so this is a very appropriate association for a media editing service and application.

Allegra’s naming experience illustrates an important point that The Name Inspector has been trying to get across to people lately. The names that are the most descriptive of a company–the ones that are the easiest to come up with–are often not the best ones. Going directly from the idea of the company to the name just doesn’t seem to be that effective. In successful naming efforts, what often happens is that a name idea comes from a dream or a random connection of some kind, and after the name presents itself, so to speak, it just seems to fit. Then, on reflection, one can see what accounts for that fit. This is why naming seems so simple but is actually so hard. Going from the company to the right name is an uphill climb, but getting from the name to the company is–or should be–a ride downhill.

Thanks for your story, Allegra, and good naming work!

Tags: LimberMedia, Limber Media, limber, flexible, editing, online editing, media