The name Twitter is not itself a pun, but it’s a set-up for a pun. It pretends to be a simple metaphorical name that casts the textual cacophony of its special kind of web exhibitionism as bird noise. But then there’s the connection to the expression all atwitter, used to describe someone filled with emotional agitation and excitement. That expression makes lines like this one, from Dan Frost’s Twitter story in the SF Chronicle, inevitable:

A simple little technology has the digerati all atwitter.

Frost can’t resist making another pun in his next line:

Make that the Twitterati.

In case you haven’t come across Twitter yet, it’s an application that lets anyone read and contribute to a constant stream of short text messages from people describing what they’re doing at that very moment. You can follow it on your phone, an IM client, or the Twitter website.

The Name Inspector signed up for a Twitter account but has not yet succumbed to its temptations. He works hard not to check his email every five minutes–the last thing he needs is something he can check every five seconds.

Something interesting about the metaphor behind Twitter is that it evokes the concept of twittering from the perspective of birds, not humans. If you’re on Twitter, you’re listening to others twitter and you’re twittering yourself. You are a bird. The Name Inspector imagines that for birds it’s very reassuring to be surrounded by the cheerful chirps of your conspecifics. That seems to be at the heart of this name’s charm.

Never mind that the word twitter sounds inconsequential. That’s beside the point. Or rather, maybe it is the point. Twitter is the antidote to news sites where you can read endless articles about the last terrible thing that happened. It lets you revel in non-news–the minutia of everyday human existence. It also, of course, creates a surprising sense of intimacy among complete strangers (even more than a blog does).

A somewhat unfortunate association evoked by this name is the word twit, which has not quite been reclaimed as a badge of honor the way geek and nerd have. Oddly, there’s a netcast company called TWiT (for This WEEK in TECH) whose founder stopped participating on Twitter because his many fans there assumed his company must be part of or associated with Twitter in some way. Consider the irony: someone whose company is called TWiT worrying about being associated with someone else’s company name.

The sound of the name Twitter is light and quick, and there’s something onomatopoetic about it. The voiceless alveolar stop [t] followed by the liquid [w] comes just short of making a whistling or chirping sound. When you say the name, the smallness and rapidity of the movements you make with your tongue, especially when pronouncing the tiny second syllable, suggest little creatures like birds.

Tags: twitter, the name twitter, birds, exhibitionism, voyeurism

If you’ve bought an artsy-crafty item on the web lately, or if you read Fred Wilson’s blog A VC, then you’ve probably run into Etsy. Since launching in June 2005, this Brooklyn-based company has managed to build an extremely enthusiastic fan base and become the eBay of handmade goods.

Etsy is all about community. There’s a blog (of course) and a forum and a wiki and something called Etsy Labs, an actual physical space in Brooklyn where they give classes about how to make things. Pretty brilliant–building community and training their own suppliers!

And what about the name Etsy? Where does it come from? Ah, that is the mystery. There’s been a thread about that question for more than a year and a half on the Etsy forum. Etsy developer Rokali/Rob has done nothing to clear the mystery up, and has even cranked up his own fog machine. First he hinted that the name is somehow related to Federico Fellini’s film 8½. In a brief television spot on the company, he suggested that the name is from Latin et si ‘and if’. Another Etsy developer, RevolvingDork, cryptically mentioned the sentence “IT’S A SECRET TO EVERYBODY!” on the forum, and pointed to a screen capture from a video game (which has since been removed). Someone picked up on the clue and conjectured that Etsy is based on that sentence: ignore the article a, make an acronym, reverse the letters, and replace the i with a y. Simple.

Contributors to the forum have also come up with their own theories. One is that Etsy is based on the Unix directory /etc, pronounced “et-C”. The Name Inspector came up with his own crazy theory: if you write eBay as Ebay, the orthographic similarity to Etsy is striking, because the t in Etsy looks like a b missing part of its curve, and the s looks like a backwards a missing a line. Simple. Turns out someone on the forum already thought of that.

Does it really matter where Etsy comes from or what it means? What’s really interesting is the strength of the community’s conviction that Etsy must mean something. People crave meaning, and will look for it if it doesn’t walk up and say “hey”. The desire to figure out the “secret” of the name Etsy might matter more than any true story about its origin.

Of course, whatever the founders may have had in mind when they came up with it, the name Etsy has its own special character. It rhymes with the name Betsy, which makes it vaguely personified and friendly. Mostly it’s tiny. It evokes the phrase itsy-bitsy, and has all the right sound symbolism to match. The -y ending is unmistakeably diminutive sounding. The short and high-ish first vowel and the voiceless alveolar consonants in the middle all add to the smallness evoked by the sound. Also, when you say this name, you make tiny little gestures with the tip of your tongue.

So, why would a company want its name to seem small? Well, it’s cute, and a lot of the stuff sold on Etsy is cute (plush toys that are “shy” and need “lots of hugs”, crocheted anthropomorphic ice cream cones, Big Eye kitty patches, etc.). The cuteness also contributes to the friendly vibe on the website and in the forum.

Cuteness aside, the concept of smallness fits the company. It conveys the idea that the merchandise on the site is made in small quantities on a small scale (usually by individuals rather than companies), and Etsy itself is a small company. Also, smallness suggests precision and attention to minute detail, which is perfect for handmade goods.

The name Etsy projects the image of a small grass-roots start-up. If the company continues to live up to this image, it could be really big.

Tags: Etsy, the name Etsy, handmade, hand-crafted, crafts, artisans, eBay

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 felicitous ambiguity? Well, that’s a term that The Name Inspector just made up, but it’s the property of having more than one meaning appropriate for a given situation. Many good names have this property, but Digg, being based on a single word, displays it in its purest form.

One meaning is ‘investigate, look hard’, as in If you want to find out about this, you’re going to have to dig. A related meaning, found in the expression dig up, is ‘discover’, as in Here’s something I dug up on the internet. Both of these evoke a culturally shared metaphor in which pieces of information are thought of as objects, knowing the information is equated with seeing or holding/possessing the objects, and making others aware of information is uncovering or unearthing the objects. Willfully keeping information secret, or at least making it difficult to know, is understood as covering the objects up. Think of burying a story–a turn of phrase alluded to by the little thumbs-down “Bury” button that you can use to vote against a story.

Digg is a great example of the way a name can tap into a metaphor that is conventionalized and entrenched in our language. In this case, the unearthing metaphor provides a vivid image to help us understand the function of this web application, which is to help people discover stories they might not otherwise read.

Aside from the meanings based on the burying/unearthing metaphor, there is of course the groovy 1960s-70s meaning. You dig? This meaning, similar to that of grok, is something like ‘behold and appreciate’, or sometimes just ‘like a lot’. When you vote for a story on Digg, you’re saying that you dig (like) it, and are asking others to dig (behold and appreciate) it. As with the names YouTube and Biznik, there seems to be an ironic evocation of bygone days in this name. The Name Inspector detects a trend here.

Finally, a meaning of dig that is marginally relevant is the one found in the expression to get in a dig at (someone). This is roughly synonymous with gibe, and means something like ‘a jokingly or backhandedly critical comment’. Voting against someone’s story on Digg might be seen as getting in a dig at them. But maybe The Name Inspector is stretching here.

Phonetically the name Digg is a picture of simplicity: a single, one-syllable word with no consonant clusters. Orthographically, too, it’s quite simple–even with the extra g, it’s shorter than most names. Now, about creative misspellings like that: sometimes they’re distinctive, and sometimes they’re just cheesy. Somehow Digg manages to avoid being cheesy. Those two g’s next to each other look kind of cute, and are vaguely evocative of the word egg. Not relevant, but friendly and familiar.

Tags: Digg, the name Digg, YouTube, Biznik, discovery

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 has had some correspondence with Dan, and who spoke on the same stage as Dan in the first Ignite Seattle event, he is not entirely unbiased.

Biznik was originally The Biz Group. A totally unremarkable and non-trademarkable name. But one that made it clear what we were about – business. But our group wasn’t just about business – it was about indie business, business that thinks outside of the box, that isn’t afraid to challenge the status quo; bootstrapping business, progressive, sustainable business. I wanted a name that:

1. Contained within it an allusion to what the group is all about
2. Was short and memorable
3. The domain name was available.
4. We could trademark
5. Ideally, would be a made-up name so that it’s easy to track every single reference to it, ever, on the Internet, using Google alerts.

I spent hours doing who-is lookups, and finding every cool name I could think of was already owned by somebody. Somebody, who when asked, wanted on average $6,000 to part with it. No thanks.

Some names we considered: Bizgroove (our lawyer advised it was too much like Groove Networks, which Microsoft purchased), radicalselfpromotion, bizfire, bizgroupies, and a long list of even worse options. After a couple of weeks of fruitless searching, I remembered something I once heard about creativity – “creativity is the art of absurd combinations.” I thought, why don’t I just start randomly tacking arbitrary suffixes onto “biz” and see what happens. I manage a lot of web sites, so that means I manage a lot of passwords. And one thing I’ve done for a long time is tack made-up suffixes onto real words, to get something that isn’t in the dictionary, but is memorable. One of the suffixes I used to use was n!k. As in, passwordn!k. When I thought of tacking that onto biz to create Biznik, I looked it up, and the .com domain was available. I immediately thought, that’s a stupid name – if nobody else wants it, why would I want it? So I skipped over it and kept trying other combinations, without finding anything satisfying. A few days later I came back to Biznik in my head, and ran it by my partner Lara. It occurred to both of us that it might be pretty good – it met all of our naming goals, and more – it contained an allusion to radical (beatniks, sputnik), and business (biz). I tried it out on a couple of my friends and they all liked it immediately, a reaction that hadn’t happened in the previous possible names I’d shared with them. So I went back to the computer, and sure enough, the domain was still available – I purchased it for 8 bucks.

I later found out that -nik is a Yiddish suffix that means “to have an affinity for.” And the final bonus is that members of Biznik can be referred to as “Bizniks.” It’s a multi-purpose name, and as time has passed we realize how lucky we were to get it. In fact, we discovered it by using waybackmachine.com; the domain had been previously owned by someone in London, who had let it lapse literally a few months before we stumbled on it. How cool is that?

Great story. The Name Inspector would like to thank Dan from the bottom of his heart for not naming this business Bizfire. That would have been a real Mizfire.

Biznik is lots of fun and a great name. It’s the holy grail of domain names: one that carries the right meaning in six letters or less. (An aside: This six-letter rule seems to be received wisdom in the world of web names–does anyone know how it got started?). Combining biz with the radical connotations of the suffix -nik is a surprising and funny juxtaposition that gives this name real personality. Of course, -nik is not really radical in a threatening way. It ironically evokes the Cold War era, and its Yiddish origin, its association with beatnik, and its diminutive sound give it a kind of lighthearted friendliness.

Phonetically the name is great, with the repeated vowel sound and the smooth transition between the sounds [z] and [n], which are similarly pronounced. Biznik is nice orthographically, too, with the two strikingly angular letters z and k and the repetition of the letter i.

Nice name, Dan, and thanks for your story.

Tags: biznik, the name biznik, social networking, business networking, networking

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 have read a couple of Seth Godin’s books from Purple Cow to All marketers are liars, and in one of them he talks about naming the companies. So I finally e-mailed asking how to name my company, and he told me: whatever name you choose, it must yield 0 results when typed in Google search. I set off brainstorming, mostly combining letters into shapes visually (I was an architect in the past), and finally after spending hours in Google I arrived at a hybrid misspelling of “little people” (since they are my customers) mixed with lollipop ( I just like the sound of it) plus liliput – little people from my favorite book when I was a kid, Gulliver in the Liliput land or however it is you guys are saying it in English. Anyway, LILIPIP yielded 0 results in Google, and I breezed through the trademark process. But the whole process took me several weeks, so it didn’t come lightly. I was also sort of ashamed to pronounce it out loud for a while, until it stuck. And when people came up to me talking about my company after the MIT Forum presentation last week, they said it without difficulty. What this name will bring in the future, I have yet to see.

The Name Inspector is a great fan of the name Lilipip and of this story, which illustrates some interesting facts about how naming works today:

1. Findability is one of the most important considerations in selecting a name. Make sure your name will come at the top of search engine results.
2. It doesn’t matter how you come up with the idea for your name. What really matters is the process of screening and selection, and having enough good ideas to select from.
3. Thinking of candidate names and selecting the best one takes more time than you think it will.
4. That’s okay, because a great name won’t necessarily jump out at you. It’s a good idea to sit with your name ideas for a while, because some strengths are not immediately apparent. For example, you can’t make a snap judgment about the memorability of a name–you have to just wait to see which names continue to stand out in your memory.
5. Great names have multiple appropriate associations, but need not have any overt meaning.
6. The way a name looks is important (though not as important as its associations or the way it sounds).

Seth Godin covers some of these points in the post that Ksenia mentions. He really emphasizes (1), and also notices a shift in importance “from what the words mean to what the words remind you of”. He seems close to point (5) here, but goes so far as to suggest that the original meaning of the name you select “doesn’t matter at all”, because what’s important are the secondary meanings the name will acquire in association with your company, product, or service. Here the Name Inspector must disagree. While it’s true that most names no longer generically describe what they stand for, the meanings evoked by the linguistic raw material from which a name is constructed matter a lot. Even the name Starbucks, which Godin rightly points out has little if anything to do with coffee, is made of recognizable parts that nevertheless bring good associations to the table.

Now about the name Lilipip. You can tell this is a name created by an architect, because it has a striking orthographic balance created by repeating visual elements. First there are all those vertical lines, long ones alternating with short ones. The long ones extend up in the two l’s in the left half of the name and down in the p’s in the right half, creating a kind of mirror-image effect. Then of course the three vowel letters in this name are all the same–in fact, every other letter in this name is an i.

The strong orthographic shape of the name reflects a strong phonetic profile. The pattern of repeating consonants and vowels is striking and singsongy in a good way. The liquid [l] sounds and the high vowels are light and diminutive sounding, which is very appropriate for a children’s media company. Let’s just come right out and say it: this name is cute!

Tags: Lilipip, Seth Godin