Come up With the Perfect Name for Anything With These Helpful Web Tools
Naming things is tricky, especially if the name needs to be unique. Over the years I have worked with sites called Urlesque (rhymes with burlesque, this is about memes), Slacktory (which is a factory for relaxation) and Valleywag (which is eerily close to being called “Boomshank”). I’ve always liked the evocative names of the sites on the Gizmodo network. Sploid is associated with splashes, tabloids and explosions; Deadspin Gives ESPN Unexpected Angle; Kotaku makes the slightest change to the Japanese term for obsessive botanical interest . Better known names like Instagram, Medium, and Upworthy also convey multiple meanings compactly. The same approach is popular for fictional character names: Darth Vader, Voldemort, and Ebenezer Scrooge immediately read like bad guys.
Creating a smart (but not overly smart) name requires both inspiration and painstaking work, and in either case, you need a huge base of words. The correct name might be an ordinary word with several meanings, a rhyming pun, or a word mixed with an unexpected suffix. Here are my favorite tools for creating original names, so you never get stuck just adding -ist to a noun.
One look
This powerful vocabulary tool allows you to search for a partial word or topic and specify parts of speech, but the real value lies in combining these search parameters. This is especially useful for building word lists based on common letters or syllables.
Let’s say I call a dating app for gym goers. Searching for ” *: exercise ” gives me “workout”, “workout”, “fitness”. If I like “fitness,” I can enter “ * e *: dating ” and get “flirting,” “having an affair,” or “infatuation.” Now I have my first potential names: Flitness and Infituation. Or if I go in the direction of Grindr, I can stop at Drill and end the day.
RhymeZone
This site does a lot more than its name suggests. Use it to find homophones, similar-sounding words, phrases, and famous texts or poems. You can sort the results by syllable, popularity, or “rhyme rating”.
In my gym dating app, I can search for phrases containing the word fitness , such as fitness twinning or fitness, and then search for monosyllabic rhymes such as fitness twinning or physical fitness. It’s not a pretty process, but every good name is built on a thousand bad names.
Child Name Wizard
People need names too, especially fake ones. This best-in-class baby name guide gives the meanings of names just like any other, but also shows the popularity of a name over time, the celebrities and lyrics of the given name, and the common names of siblings. Advanced search allows you to specify popularity, ethnicity, religious names, and non-standard spellings. So, my millennial-targeted gym dating app is picking up Brandon and Brooke users.
Fantasy name generators
The names of the characters are not always similar to the real ones. They need a certain scent, but it is often difficult to describe. This site offers hundreds of types of names such as gnomes , genies, and superheroes , as well as names from fictional worlds as disparate as Lovecraft’s myths and Pokémon . Even if you create your own name, looking at a few examples will help you figure out if you need something throaty, melodic, or monosyllabic. The unlicensed advertisement for my Hunger Games app gets character names like Trifle Seaflake and Ethelia Heavenscape.
Wikipedia
Obviously, any naming session will involve multiple k-holes on Wikipedia, but since the site is very well organized, any long post will include some ideal brainstorming tools. Scroll down to the “See Also “and” Category “, so as not to miss the opportunity to explore. The term “fitness” means “personal trainer” – I can turn him into a “personal assistant” if I want to lead every presentation explaining my “double” pun.
Instant Domain Search
If you are calling something other than a website, there is no reason to limit your choices to names with an unused .com domain. Instead of settling for .net or adding a hyphen, attach any simple name to an unusual and memorable domain extension. The creators of the Reply All podcast knew they couldn’t get the obvious .com, so they registered domains like replyall.limo and replyall.diamonds and redirected them to a less obvious URL. For some unknown reason, the Hello From the Magic Tavern podcast uses puppies.supplies .
Click Search All in Instant Domain Search to see the wide range of available domain extensions such as .dog, .pink or .rocks. For my Drill app to connect to a gym, I can register Drill.dating or Drill.singles.
I know Drill is a little ahead, but it hooks better than the Physical Fitkiss.