The Name Inspector has recently learned about Lard Butt , a new athletic apparel company based here in Seattle. This is a great example of naming done right. First, there are the positive associations of lard, a filling and economical ingredient that makes fried foods taste great. The word lard also...

The word awkwordplay, which The Name Inspector has just coined, demonstrates what it means: awkward wordplay. A play on words can be awkward for different reasons, and awkwordplay shows one of the most common reasons: a mismatch in syllable emphasis. Awkwordplay is a blend based on the phonetic over...

Suppose you want to write a computer program to look for unregistered domain names. You could devise a simple algorithm to produce all possible combinations of four letters, five letters, six letters, etc. But that would give you a whole mess of unpronounceable domains, like alsdh.com. So, you might...

Sometimes it takes a crazy kind of name to snap a name inspector out of a long dry spell. Verb for Shoe is just that kind of name. It belongs to a computerized, interactive shoe created by MIT-spinoff VectraSense Technologies. Apparently this shoe detects different activities of its wearer and infla...

Entrepreneur and longtime reader Rich Skrenta has a search start-up called Blekko (click on that link and say hi!). It was covered on TechCrunch, and then Rich wrote a follow-up blog post telling the story of the name Blekko and asking for The Name Inspector’s input. OK, here goes. Obviously B...

The Name Inspector just learned about Incesoft, which claims on its website to be “the world’s leading provider of web robot technology”. Now, this is a Chinese company (which was selected for inclusion on the 2007 Red Herring 100 Asia list), so that’s a bit of an excuse, but...

While perusing the New York Times magazine last weekend, The Name Inspector saw a big ad for a new organic vodka called Crop . It’s clear what they were going for with this name. It connects the product to its agricultural origins. It makes the vodka seem like something natural and fresh and w...