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Comment by nirvana | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain the criteria for each of the tags given in the article? For instance, the "google" tag presumably means "if you google this term, the startup will likely be on the first page of results" (or maybe it means something else?) Is agreeability essentially the same thing (Eg: a unique word) or is it something else? What decides whether something is yellow or red in the "mis-spellings"?

We've got a really great name for our startup, and I'd like to evaluated it by other people's criteria (though, unfortunately, I'm not ready to mention it publicly, since we're still securing everything.) The "really great" aspect of it is a gut feeling, so, I could be wrong.

View on HN

    EVOC  Evocativity       Conveys at least a hint of what it’s naming
    BREV  Brevity           Shorter = better
    GREP  Greppability      Not a substring of common words
    GOOG  Googlability      Reasonably unique (and domain name available)
    PRON  Pronounceability  You can read it out loud when you see it
    SPEL  Spellability      You know how it’s spelled when you hear it
    VERB  Verbability       The name (or variant thereof) can be used as a verb

Source: http://messymatters.com/2011/10/31/nominology/

One of the key factors for us was trademark ability. Looking at the dropbox issue mentioned below supports this. Dropbox.com was registered in 1995 by someone who wasn't using it, but was acquired after (possibly as a result of) a lawsuit by the owners of the dropbox service...

We fail on greppability, possibly googlablitly (17million results) and verb ability. But we win on the rest.

Just added to HN (hackernewsed? hm, not the best verbability here ;) ) as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3180861

You can have a phonetically spelt word that still is close to a real word, but that gets auto-corrected when people try and use it. And that is bad. Because auto-correction is everywhere these days.

For me this problem didn't appear until all the predictive spelling started appearing. Now it is a major problem.

> (or maybe it means something else?)

I think it mostly has to do with loaded terms. If you company is called "cool.com", it's a loaded term and searching for something related to the company will yield a lot of false positives - e.g. cool cms.

Totally agree. Plus 1. Good point.

I see that you have been around for some time, and you tend to post "totally agree" style comments. Just so you know, the general etiquette here is to upvote if you agree, and don't have anything else to add.

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