Business Name Generator

What the business name generator does

You are starting something and it needs a name. Maybe a company, maybe a shop, maybe a side project that has got out of hand.

This hands you business names. Run off a set and look through it.

But before you fall in love with one, there is a rule about business names that almost nobody knows until a lawyer tells them, and it is the opposite of what your instincts say. It is worth four minutes.

How to use it

Ask for plenty, since naming is a hunting job rather than a picking one. Hit Generate for a fresh set, then Copy to drop them into a document where you can start crossing things out.

The clearer your name, the less of it you own

Say you are opening a bakery. Your instinct says call it something that tells people you sell bread. Fresh Bread Bakery. Sensible. Clear. Nobody is confused.

And you will not own a single word of it.

There is a ladder that American courts use to decide how strong a name is, and it comes from a 1976 case, Abercrombie & Fitch against Hunting World. Lawyers call it the Abercrombie spectrum and it has five rungs.

• Generic. The name of the thing itself. Bread, for bread. Never protectable, not ever, because everybody has to be allowed to say what they sell.
• Descriptive. Describes what it does or how good it is. Fast Acting. Best Buy. Almost never protectable on its own, for the same reason.
• Suggestive. Hints, and makes you do a little work to get there. Greyhound for buses, because greyhounds are quick. Netflix. Coppertone. This rung is protectable.
• Arbitrary. A real word with nothing to do with the business. Apple, for computers. Delta, for aeroplanes. Subway, for sandwiches. Strong.
• Fanciful. A word that did not exist until you made it up. Kodak. Xerox. Exxon. Clorox. Strongest of the lot.

Read that ladder again from the top down and watch what is happening. The rungs are ordered by how much the name explains. And the protection runs in exactly the opposite direction.

So the name that does the best job of telling a customer what you do is the name you have the least right to stop anyone else from using. And the word that meant absolutely nothing until Thursday is the one the law will defend for you.

The logic is not spiteful. If Fresh Bread Bakery could own the phrase, the next baker down the road could not honestly describe their own bread. The law would rather protect everyone's ability to speak plainly than protect your marketing.

Which is why every drug you have ever been prescribed sounds like a Bond villain. Xeljanz, Skyrizi, Wegovy. Those are not accidents. They are fanciful marks, invented from nothing, and nobody on earth can argue they needed that word.

The companies that won so hard they lost the name

Now the other end of it, which is bleaker and much funnier.

You can climb to the top of that ladder, invent a perfect word out of thin air, own it completely, and still lose it. You lose it by winning.

If your brand becomes the word people use for the whole category, it stops being your brand and becomes the category. The law has a name for this. Genericide.

Aspirin was Bayer's. It was a made up word, a fanciful mark, the strongest kind there is. It worked so well that people started calling all acetylsalicylic acid aspirin, and in the United States, Bayer does not own it any more. It is just the word for the pills.

Escalator was a trademark too. Someone owned the moving staircase. Then everybody called every moving staircase an escalator, and now nobody owns it. Cellophane went the same way.

This is why Xerox spent decades and real money on adverts asking people to please say photocopy. It looks like corporate fussiness. It is a company watching the edge of a cliff. Kleenex and Velcro are in the same fight right now.

So the whole thing is a narrow path. Name it too clearly and you never own it. Name it brilliantly and succeed too hard and it gets taken off you. Somewhere in between there is a name that is yours.

Taking a business name apart

Pull a few from the list and look at what they are doing.

• Aurora Innovations
• Velvet Horizon
• Noble Origins
• Elysian Edge
• Opulent Oasis
• Radiant Ventures
• Chroma Quest

Put them on the ladder. Not one of them describes a business. Velvet Horizon does not tell you anything. Elysian Edge tells you less than that. They are sitting up on the arbitrary rung, which is the good end.

That is on purpose, and it is the main reason a list like this is more useful than your first instinct. Left alone, most people name their company by describing it, and land on the rung with no protection.

Now the honest part.

Read those seven again and notice they all went to the same party. Aurora. Velvet. Noble. Elysian. Opulent. Radiant. The whole list is reaching in one direction, and that direction is premium. Celestial, ethereal, regal, enchanted. It is all silk and starlight.

There is not a blunt name in here. No Bolt. No Stack. No Patch. Nothing short, nothing plain, nothing with dirt under its fingernails.

So if you are naming a jewellery brand or a spa or a wedding photographer, this list is aimed directly at you. If you are naming a plumbing firm, a payroll tool or a company that hauls gravel, Elysian Edge is going to get you laughed at, and no amount of legal strength fixes that. Take the shape and throw away the vocabulary: two words, second one abstract, first one doing the mood. Then pick your own mood.

Starts with, contains, and ends with

• Starts with reads the first letter of the name.
• Ends with reads the last letter.
• Contains searches the whole thing and ignores capitals.

Two things about this list will catch you out.

E is enormous. Ask for names starting with E and you will be buried. That is the premium vocabulary showing its hand: Elysian, Ethereal, Enchanted, Elegance, Emporium, Elements. English is full of expensive sounding E words and this list ate all of them. V and R and C are heavy for the same reason. Meanwhile X and Y return nothing at all, and K, T and W will give you almost nothing.

Ends with is dominated by S, and that is not English being English, that is the corporate plural. Innovations. Ventures. Creations. Elements. Studios. Dreamworks. The second word in a two word company name is very often a plural noun, so the list piles up on one letter.

Which is worth a thought before you use it. If everything in your shortlist ends in S, your name sounds like a category of company rather than a company. Sometimes that is what you want. Often it is why the name feels forgettable and you cannot say why.

Contains is the useful one for naming. Put in a sound you like and see what the list has. Try lux, or ver, or ora.

Type in any box and the names redraw as you go. And if you ask for fifty when only six match, the quantity drops to six to tell you that is all there is.

Where these come from

Nothing clever, and that is on purpose.

Behind the button is a hand-assembled list, each name looked over one by one. Press Generate and the list is narrowed to whatever matches your boxes, then names are drawn at random from what is left. No repeats inside one batch.

We are not bolting a word list onto another word list to manufacture a big number. That approach gives you thousands of names and most of them are unusable, and you have to read all of them to find that out. A shorter list somebody actually looked at wastes less of your afternoon.

The whole thing works offline in your browser, with nothing sent anywhere.

Before you print anything

A name off a list is a candidate, not a decision. Here is the order I would do it in.

Say it on the phone. Not read it. Say it, to a stranger, and see if they can write it down. If you have to spell it every single time, you have bought yourself a small tax that you will pay for years.

Search it before you love it. Somebody has it. That is the default assumption and it is usually right. Search the name plus your industry, then search it on its own, then look at the images tab, which is where the unpleasant surprises live.

Check the actual trademark register, not just Google. A name being free on Google means nothing. Trademarks are granted per class of goods, so the same word can be owned by a shoe company and free for a software company. This is the step people skip and then regret in year three, and it is the one worth paying somebody to do properly.

Do not take the descriptive one because it was easier. Everything above says it is the weakest thing you can pick. It will feel safe. It is the opposite of safe.

And check it in other languages. If you will ever sell anywhere else, run it past a speaker. Made up words are the most dangerous here, because a word you invented from nothing has no meaning in English and might have a very vivid one somewhere else.

We are not lawyers and none of this is legal advice. It is the shape of the problem, so you know which questions to take to somebody who is.

Questions people ask

Can I actually use one of these names?

These are word combinations, not registered brands, so nothing here is lifted from an existing company. But that is not the same as the name being free. Any pleasant sounding pair of English words has probably occurred to somebody else, so search it and check the register before you commit.

Should my business name say what my business does?

For selling, a bit. For owning, no. A name that describes your product sits on the rung with no protection, which means a competitor can use something very close to it and you have little to say about it. Most people's instinct pulls hard toward describing, and the law pulls the other way.

What about the .com?

Assume the good one is taken, because it is. Almost every short pronounceable English word was registered a long time ago. This is a large part of why modern companies have invented names: not branding fashion, just what is left.

Is a made up word better than a real one?

Legally, yes, it is the strongest thing you can have. Practically it costs more, because a word nobody has heard means nothing until you spend money teaching people what it means. Arbitrary names like Apple split the difference: real word, already in everyone's head, no connection to the product.

Why does the letter E give me so many names?

Because the vocabulary in this list leans expensive, and English keeps a lot of its expensive words under E. Ethereal, Elysian, Elegance, Emporium. It says more about the list than about the letter.

References

1. Abercrombie classification. Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/abercrombie_classification
2. Distinctive trademark. Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/distinctive_trademark
3. Abercrombie & Fitch Co. v. Hunting World, Inc., 537 F.2d 4 (2d Cir. 1976). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abercrombie_%26_Fitch_Co._v._Hunting_World
4. Trademark distinctiveness and generic marks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_distinctiveness