Misspelling–let’s call it “creative” spelling to put a less negative spin on it–is a mainstay of consumer brand names from Cheez Whiz to Flickr. Doing it right requires careful attention to microstyle.

An important principle of microstyle, and one that applies to spelling, is expressive economy. That means getting the most meaning out of the least message.  Applied to spelling, expressive economy means not using more letters than you have to. If you’re going to misspell a word, you might as well make it more compact, right? Typically, yes. Cheez Whiz and Flickr both do well with expressive economy, and they’re quite memorable. Names that don’t observe the principle, like Brandtology (are we supposed to pronounce that t?) and  Bountii, often look clunky and confusing. Perhaps more importantly, since the extra letters aren’t motivated by the pronunciation, it’s hard to recover the spelling from the sound, and that makes the spelling much harder to remember.

It is possible to add letters to a word in a cute way. The name Digg comes to mind: the double “gg” on the end can’t help but remind you of the adorable word egg. And that tells us something important about extra letters: when they work, there’s usually a reason for them to be there, however subtle. Automattic is a good name for a company started by a guy named Matt, for example.

Some names push expressive economy to the limit, eliminating letters that can’t be unambiguously recovered. The defunct url-shortening service br.st, for example, should probably be pronounced like the word burst, which sort of turns the r into a vowel. But can we be certain it’s not based on the word breast? And how about gdgt, for a tech review site. It’s based on the word gadget, but outside a tech context it might be hard to see that.

Balance also plays an important role in creative spelling. Correct spelling has plenty of redundancy in it. If you simplify spelling in some parts of a word while leaving other parts noticeably redundant, the result seems like a job half done. Take Clikthrough, for example. Since they’ve gone to the trouble of simplifying click to clik, why not streamline the cumbersome word through, which uses seven letters to express three sounds? Clikthru would be much better. Maybe the owner of the parked domain clikthru.com wouldn’t part with it, at least not for a reasonable price.

So, in the wake National Grammar Day, when we’re supposed to remember to do things right, let’s also remember that there’s a right way to do things wrong.

That’s phonotactics–the study of sound sequences that do and do not occur in a given language. Some non-occurring sound sequences are simply unpronounceable and are not found in any language. Others are pronounceable but just don’t fit the idiosyncratic preferences of a particular language.

Lately The Name Inspector has noticed a bunch of names used in English-speaking contexts that don’t toe the line of normal English phonotactics. He suspects this is a new strategy for creating short names that are available as .com domains.

It’s really common for names to mess with orthography. That strategy is typical of Web 2.0 names (Flickr, Digg, Zooomr, etc.) and has been with us for a long time (Cheez Whiz). But phonology has been pretty sacred until now. While all the following names are pronounceable, they start with sound sequences that don’t occur syllable-initially in English, except in some borrowed words.

Zlio. This website allows you to instantly create an online affiliate store. It was in the news a while back because it got banned from Amazon.com. In English, the sequence zl- only occurs in the word zloty, the Polish currency unit.

Vlingo. This is a voice-to-text application for mobile devices. We English speakers see vl-at the beginning of a word only in the name Vladimir and in a tiny handful of obscure borrowed words.

Jwaala. An online banking tool. This name is based on a Sanskrit-derived word for ‘fire’. English has plenty of words in which j- is followed by the vowel -u- (e.g. juvenile), but none in which it’s followed by the related consonant -w-.

Srixon. The name of this golf ball manufacturer has a beginning that English speakers only find in the place name Sri Lanka.

How much farther can the phonological sensibilities of English speakers be pushed? As names become increasingly scarce, let’s wait and see.

Tags: zlio, the name zlio, vlingo, the name vlingo, jwaala, the name jwaala, srixon, the name srixon