

The Weird Science of Naming New Products - samclemens
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/18/magazine/the-weird-science-of-naming-new-products.html

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ealfert
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.

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AtmaScout
That was defiantly in my top three.

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benbreen
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/](http://gimletmedia.com/episode/5-how-to-name-your-company/)

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greeneggs
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](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/10/03/famous-names)

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

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walterbell
Etymology resources:

free web, [http://www.etymonline.com/](http://www.etymonline.com/)

free Windows app, 1888 OED, 15000 pages searchable:
[https://archive.org/details/oed11_201407](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?...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/english-
bigdict/id397603643?mt=8) (includes historical references to ancestral words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...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/shorter-oxford-english-
dictionary/id679638443?mt=8) (be careul, there are several similarly named
apps made by licensees of the OED brand, this one has 600K words)

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tonydiv
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.

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eps
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 :)

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gojomo
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.

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

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

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amelius
Why not just start a naming-contest?

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

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

