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Comment by dkopi | Hacker News Reader

I'm fascinated by the use of random word combinations instead of a random alphanumeric sequence for passing a unique URL.

What was the reasoning behind this decision? On one hand, it sort of acts like a phonetic alphabet if you want to read out the URL over skype. But on the other hand - is OberonNostalgicCeciliaVoltage really that easy to spell if you aren't a native English speaker?

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Hello. As other comments mentioned, it is easier to communicate these URLs over the phone. These words were chosen very specifically to be short, phonetically different from one another, easy to understand over the phone, and also recognizable internationally. Here is the list:

http://web.archive.org/web/20090918202746/http://tothink.com...

This always felt like overkill to me.

a 4 character alpha-numeric code is 36^4 (1.6M) which is fine for new websites.

If you run out, add a 5th character which gets you to 60M, and a 6th character gets you 2T.

I forget which site it is off the top of my head but there's a pretty prominent gif sharing site that does it I often get linked to.

I think it's basically just as you say, for English speakers anyway, a bit of an easier way to read out URLs when talking in person or voice chatting. With non-English speakers it doesn't do much, and you're forced to say letter for letter as you would with a lot of other URLs.

its gfycat.com

Yes gfycat is what partially inspired us too.

One twist on this would be to somehow limit the wordlist to words that have relatively unambiguous pronunciation, and maybe limit those to the 100 000 most commonly used ones.

Of course then you'll have to use more words for a similar number of links.

Also, would "TouchingPlayfulEnjoyAspect" be something you want to tell a interview candidate? (First one it generated for me)

Well it would certainly make for a hilarious interview.

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