Brent Bushnell » words

Company Naming Resources

brent — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 04:27:20 +0000

Naming companies is so difficult. The number of constraints a name must satisfy only seems to grow each year. Between the dearth of available domain names, acceptability in other languages and international markets you might go into, it’s surprising we don’t have more names like Zzyzx.

Here are some resources to help with the process:

List of root words – It can be useful to combine these with a word or words relating to your business.
NameBoy.com – A site that allows you to select a few words and it will check various combinations if they are available domain names
Etymologies of existing company names: Wikipedia List, Business Insider article
PCNames – A tool that merges words and checks their availability in realtime
FuseName – Another tool to check availability of name combinations

The non-phonetic alphabet

brent — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 02:11:56 +0000

There are many different phonetic alphabets out there, for various applications including telecom, military etc. A variety are covered here.

I’m fascinated with what a hodgepodge the English language is and how often the spelling or pronunciation of its words are counter-intuitive. In appreciation, here’s a start at the Non-Phonetic Alphabet:

A as in Aoxomoxoa, aurulent
C as in Cthulhu
E as in eugenics
G as in gnostic, gnarly, gnome, gnat
H as in honor, hour, herbivore
K as in knife, know, knob, knot
M as in mnemonic
O as in ouroboros
P as in psychotic, pneumatic, psalm, pterodactyl
S as in seedy
T as in tsunami
W as in wrestle, wrong, write, whole
X as in xylem, xenophobe, xantham

Many thanks to Christine for great contributions.

4 vowel words

brent — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 08:20:05 +0000

There is a small set of English words that have 4 consecutive vowels, such as “sequoia” and “Kauai”. After trying in vain to come up with more than a few, I brute forced a solution and enjoyed reviewing the results.

I got a huge English word list from here (I used the Scowl one).

The following command line searched for all words with 4 vowels in a row and cleaned up the output:
egrep "[aeiou]{4}" * | awk -F: '{print $2}' | sort | sed -e "/'/d" | uniq
I was really surprised by how many came up (366)! Add “y” and it goes up to 694.

It’s interesting to look up the definitions of the results. So far they’ve all been real words, albeit really obscure.

A list of the words returned is here.

Words about groups

brent — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 05:58:21 +0000

For some reason, etymologists and scientists have felt the need to address groups of organisms using different words. Some, are more commonly known, like a “gaggle of geese” or “herd of elephants” . Here are some lesser known examples:

aarmory of aardvarks
army of ants
barrel of monkeys
battery of barracuda
bed of clams
bloat of hippos
cast of crab
cete of badgers
cloud of bats
coalition of cheetah
coffle of asses
company of parrots
congregation of alligators
flight of butterfly
intrusion of cockroach
leash of deer
lodge of beavers
maul of bears
murder of crows
orchestra of crickets
pack (wild) / litter (young) of dogs
parliament of magpie
peep of chickens
pod of dolphins
pounce of cats
prickle of porcupines
rout of coyote
scourge of mosquito
shoal of bass
stripe of zebra
swarm of bees
thunder of bison
train of camel
troop of baboons

nymble

brent — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 09:13:07 +0000

For some reason, I like words about words. These are not so useful in casual conversation, but awareness of them lends insight into the evolution of language and its structure. Following here are some of my favorites:

retronym – A word that has been changed to allow greater specificity for that word. e.g. “television” had to become “broadcast television” with the advent of “satellite television” and “cable television”. See here for more examples.

eponym – a word naming a place, discovery, era or other item after its discoverer. Most interesting to me are the corporate eponyms that become the general term to describe something, e.g. Kleenex for tissue, Band-Aid for adhesive bandage, Xerox for copy machine. A more complete list is available here

capitonym – a word with the same spelling but different meaning based on capitalization. e.g. August vs august (the month vs the adjective)

heteronym – two words spelled identically but with different meanings and pronunciation. e.g. tear (rip something) vs tear (water from the eye)

meronym – Using part of something to refer to its whole. e.g. Threads (slang) as a meronym of clothes.

hyponym – a word of more specific meaning than another. A subset. e.g. Blue is a hyponym of color.

hypernym – a word of more broad meaning than another. A superset. e.g. Color is a hypernym of yellow.

antonym – a word opposite in meaning to another. e.g. love is an antonym of hate.

homonym – words with the same pronunciation but different meanings. e.g. There, their and they’re are all homonym’s of each other.

toponym – a word/phrase naming a place based on some physical feature. See place name origins for a more complete description.

metonym – a word/phrase used as a substitute for something else it is closely associated with. e.g. “Madison Avenue” is a metonym for advertising.

ASCII Words

brent — Thu, 24 May 2007 20:18:04 +0000

Alternate names for a few of the ASCII characters:

# = the octothorpe

& = the ampersand

` = the grave accent

@ = abbreviation for “at the rate of”

/ = solidus

SI Prefixes

brent — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 22:10:12 +0000

With things only getting much bigger and much smaller, boning up on the terms for various magnitudes seems appropriate. Following is set of the International System of Units prefixes. This way when Apple comes out with it’s next smallest gadget, you’ll be right there with them.

Factor	Name	Symbol
10²⁴	yotta	Y
10²¹	zetta	Z
10¹⁸	exa	E
10¹⁵	peta	P
10¹²	tera	T
10⁹	giga	G
10⁶	mega	M
10³	kilo	k
10²	hecto	h
10¹	deka	da
10^-1	deci	d
10^-2	centi	c
10^-3	milli	m
10^-6	micro	Âµ
10^-9	nano	n
10^-12	pico	p
10^-15	femto	f
10^-18	atto	a
10^-21	zepto	z
10^-24	yocto	y