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Why Such Unimaginative Nomenclature?

Posted by Cliff on from the refill-the-bottle-of-creative-juices dept.

apoplectic asks: "Pick a word. A noun would be nice, but not required. Now, imagine a potentially meaningful adjective or other nebbish modifier, select the first letter, and append this to either the beginning or the end of the noun you originally chose. Some examples, include: JBoss, WebL, GStreamer, eMachine, iPod, and of course the XBox. I realize that the exceptions greatly outweigh this rule, but this does seem to be a disproportionately invoked naming standard that lacks a little 'je ne sais quoi'. Why is this so common? Do you really like this 'standard', or is this like something touched on by an episode of Futurama? Have, we have run out of names that have yet to be copyrighted, and all we are left with is Poppler -- or some hideous cryptic name from the aforementioned 'UName' naming standard. Why does it seem as if quite a few applications, along with many a geeky item, follow such unimaginative naming conventions?"

4 of 153 comments (clear)

  1. Some figures by Bazzargh · · Score: 4, Informative

    Owen Densmore covered this in his O'Reilly blog last year - he checked /usr/dict/words against DNS, to see how many words werent taken. There were only 43 4-letter words left from the .com namespace, junk like "frib", and "odso".

    There were a few thousand 5- and 6- letter words left, but again, all pretty uncommon words: "upwaft.com" or "bepity.com" anyone? Most 'real' words are claimed by someone, somewhere, and the only option for making a name that uses words people know is to make one up by sticking words together, or letters and words together.

    -Baz

  2. Re:Oh come on, by nathanh · · Score: 2, Informative
    Isn't Ogg Vorbis original enough?

    Terry Pratchett's originality. They're both names of characters from his Discworld books.

  3. English word creation... by stienman · · Score: 4, Informative

    There are english geeks who understand how to create new pleasing word in the english language, but they don't reside among us computer geeks in great numbers. Part of the reason has to do with laziness, and another part is famiarity. This is why companies have both an engineering dept and marketting dept, rather than one group that does it all.

    When engineers are given a spec, they don't have a name for it. Eventually, in order to ease communication, shortcuts are created which bear some resemblance to what the project is or does, or is just a pet name. Mozilla was one such name in the development cycle of netscape early on. If the engineers were in charge of naming, because it was so familiar to them, they would choose the pet name regardless of market perception. By default is not generally the best way to name a product.

    Furthermore, it's hard to come up with a name which is both easy (and obvious) to pronounce, and produces a pleasing effect.

    "Tlorg" is a bad name because you do not start an english word with the TL combination. Battle is a word where TL is used, so it's not a bad combination, it's simply not acceptable at the beginning.

    "Blarg" is easy and fairly obvious to pronounce. But the effect of the word is not something you'd associate with a succesful, useful, and powerful product.

    -Adam

  4. Xaraya by Dracos · · Score: 2, Informative

    Maay of you are probably not familiar with Xaraya, but here's the story of where the name came from.

    "Project X", as we were calling ourselves in the early days, decided to conduct a name contest among the development team. Entries were submitted, and the voting commenced. Not happy with any of the entries, I decided to come up with something new based of 3 criteria:

    • Must start with X. Many of the devs had become collectively fond of this letter for various reasons.
    • Must end in A. I thought the product (a CMS) should be female. Most Latin-derived languages identify female words by ending in A.
    • Must have three syllables. I considered this the optimal length; nice flow, little chance of getting confused with existing words in most languages, and not too long.

    I also felt the name should be a little exotic according to US/European tastes. So, I trolled through a database of Australian place names, entering various short combinations of letters. After a while I had a list of seven possibilities... then I started swapping letters (mostly vowels).

    I presented these in IRC, and a couple of them (including Xaraya) caught on. So well, in fact, that the name voting had to be reset to include the new entries. One of our devs who lives in Spain said Xaraya reminded him of the Spanish word for Manta Ray ("raya", literally "blanket"), so I went looking for manta images to create a logo which supported this concept. "Xaraya" won the name contest, and evenually a Manta logo was also adopted.

    Of course, this name has nothing to to with what Xaraya does. Making that connection is the realm of the marketing and branding people.