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Company names, scored against the naming literature.

Paul Graham wrote an essay about startup names in 2006. Daniel Reeves republished it with seven questions to ask of any name. We kept his questions, added whether the company owns its exact .com, and set the standard with 100 companies rated by hand by a frontier model, not by any one person. Then we ran it over 7,251 companies from six corpora.

Then we did the same with five other frameworks, and checked all of it against the finance and psychology research on whether names actually predict anything.

How the scoring works

Seven questions, one tile each

  1. EVOC Evocativity
    Does it suggest what the company does?
  2. BREV Brevity
    Is it short? Seven characters or fewer is green.
  3. GREP Greppability
    Is it rare inside other words, so a text search finds it?
  4. GOOG Googlability
    Is it free of a prior meaning competing for it in search?
  5. PRON Pronounceability
    Can you say it on first sight?
  6. SPEL Spellability
    Can you spell it after only hearing it?
  7. VERB Verbability
    Could it become a verb for the product?

Good Middling Poor Not rated yet

1,227 of 7,251 names are rated on all seven dimensions. The rest carry the two computed ones (Brevity and Greppability) and show the other five as blank tiles until the model pass runs.

Highest scoring

Lowest scoring

Browse all 7,251 scored names