The Weird Science of Naming New Products | Hacker News Reader

The Weird Science of Naming New Products

nytimes.com

65 pointssamclemens15 comments

Weird, no mention of domain name search was made as part of the process.

I would think that one of the top points to research would be if the word.com was still available. I searched over 20 names listed in the article and all the .com have been registered.

That was defiantly in my top three.

Also apropos here is episode #5 of the Startup podcast, which features a look into Lexicon's naming process. (And a glance at the anxiety induced by having to decide between dozens of choices, which in this case resulted in them going with the somewhat milquetoast "Gimlet Media.")

http://gimletmedia.com/episode/5-how-to-name-your-company/

The New Yorker had a story on Lexicon in 2011, too.

'On a Mind Map, someone wrote “strawberry.” Then someone wrote beside it, “Strawberry is too slow.” Placek pronounced the word—“Str-a-a-a-w-w-berry”—drawing it out. “This technology is instantaneous,” he said. On the map, someone else wrote “blackberry.”'

Honestly, though, most of these stories are fairly similar.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/10/03/famous-names

Anyone have resources to learn this sort of science (Morphemes, Feelings associated with sounds, etc)? I find it quite interesting.

i remember wikipedia had complete information about this, ill see if i can find a link

Etymology resources:

free web, http://www.etymonline.com/

free Windows app, 1888 OED, 15000 pages searchable: https://archive.org/details/oed11_201407 (modern CD version costs $200+ on Amazon)

$9 iOS app, English BigDict, https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/english-bigdict/id397603643?... (includes historical references to ancestral words in other languages)

$30 iOS app, Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/shorter-oxford-english-dicti... (be careul, there are several similarly named apps made by licensees of the OED brand, this one has 600K words)

Respace, Skylume, and Joyager.

I like all of these names more than Jaunt personally. That said, Jaunt isn't bad, it just reminds me of jaundice and taunt as eps mentioned above.

Jaunt reads like a cross between "jaundice" (a common infantile condition and a source of worries for many new parents) and "taunt", which doesn't carry any positive connotations either.

PS. It's also not far from Joost and we all know how well that one go :)

But note: 'jaunt' is already a longstanding English word, for "short pleasure trip". (It's also been reused in a bunch of sci-fi to mean teleportation.) That makes secondary connotations recede somewhat, compared to if 'jaunt' were a truly new coinage that everyone needs to reason-out from roots/sounds.

Indeed - one might equivalently say that "taunt" sounds positive, due to its similarity to "jaunt".

They named it Jaunt by the way. It's the last word of the article.

Why not just start a naming-contest?

It should be pretty simple to make a webapp for this kind of thing.

And the January 2015 award for "Technical Solution to a Social Problem" goes to…

You probably could use a distributed group of brainstormers/researchers. But having a process that's too public has other risks: desirable names falling to trademark/domain-squatters; valuable also-ran names being reused by others; marketing/product themes leaking to competitors.

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