It might help to know these names are formed systematically.

URIs can also look inscrutable, but make more sense once you know how to break them down into scheme://user@host:port/path

Chemical names (mostly) work the same way. There are a fair number of rules and concepts, but once you understand them, the endless names map onto structures pretty cleanly[0]. Here are some of them: http://www.chem.uiuc.edu/GenChemReferences/nomenclature_rule...

[0] Mostly. There are some historical exceptions. Acetone should be called something like 2-propanone, for example, but...it isn't.

Well at least they've moved on from the days of alchemy where the tendency was to make up your own notation and jargon to obscure what you actually did :)