Fern
Y Combinator 2023 · Acquired B2B Engineering, Product and Design buildwithfern.com
Instantly offer SDKs and API Docs
Y Combinator's description, shown to identify the company. We rate the name, not the business.
Formerly Fern, fern
- Evocativity EVOC : red
- Fern gives no API or documentation cue
- Brevity BREV : green
- 4 letters, 1 syllable. Up to seven letters is green, eight at two syllables too; up to ten yellow, eleven or more red.
- Greppability GREP : red
- Found inside 35 other dictionary words.
- Googlability GOOG : red
- Fern is an ordinary plant name
- Pronounceability PRON : green
- The familiar word reads clearly
- Spellability SPEL : green
- The common plant word is easy to spell
- Verbability VERB : red
- No natural developer-tool verb
- Nominology
- 50
- All seven dimensions and .com ownership, weighted as set out on Methodology.
- Fluency
- 100
- Brevity and pronounceability only: the subset with published outcome evidence behind it.
- PG grade
- 2 / 4
- Graham's own four-step ladder.
- Exact .com
- Not owned
- Shape
- real word
- Length
- 4 chars, 1 syllable
- Distinctiveness
- arbitrary
Rubric version 2026.10.20-1, judged by gpt-6.1-sol (agent).
This scores the name only. See Methodology.
These judged dimensions came from an AI agent working through the judging queue in a chat, on the same rubric the scoring pipeline sends. The agent passed the calibration exam before its work was accepted, and each batch it judged hid two names with known answers as a check. The model is named as the agent reported it.