How to Name a Startup When All the Good Names Are Taken
The .com is gone, the obvious words are claimed. Here is how the people naming new companies right now actually do it.
You have come up with a dozen names. Every single one of them is taken. The .com is parked. The Twitter handle belongs to someone who tweeted twice in 2014 and will not respond. The trademark is registered to a company on the other side of the country in an unrelated industry. You are now considering names that look like Lyft and Fiverr — creative spellings, dropped vowels, the whole syndrome — because that is what is left. It is not what is left. The naming landscape has moved past the era when the obvious one-word .com was achievable, and the companies founded in the last five years have figured out the new toolkit. The good names are not all taken; the obvious one-word English nouns are taken, which is not the same thing. There are several whole categories of name that are still wide open, and using them is how every recent startup you can think of solved this problem.
What follows: the categories that still produce good names today, and the moves that work when single-word options are exhausted. Then a tool that generates across all of them.
Look outside English
Latin, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Hindi, Yoruba — every language has words and roots that have not been touched by trademark databases focused on English. The constraint is meaning: pick a word whose meaning is relevant or evocative, not random. Many recent companies are named with words from languages the founders speak. The cross-language move is the single largest underused source of good names left on the table.
Use compound words
Two short English words combined produce names that are still trademarkable, often have available domains, and read as natural. Slack. Stripe (one word but in a compound family). Square. Snowflake. Stripe. The pattern is two short, concrete words that suggest function or feeling. The compound space is much less explored than the single-word space because most founders default to single-word. Add a second word and the universe opens up.
Add a soft modifier
If the noun you want is taken — say, Anchor — try meaningful prefixes or suffixes that do not look like .ly or 2-letter hacks. Anchor Studios. North Anchor. Anchor Lab. The modifier specifies industry, position, or character without the manufactured-sound of made-up suffixes. The .com may be available with the modifier. The brand name in customer-facing contexts can drop the modifier later. This is how a lot of established brands started.
Use a real word that means something tangentially related
Stripe is not about stripes. Square is not about squares. Slack is not about slack. The name evokes a feeling or a metaphor that connects to the company's character without being literally descriptive. Real common English words are often available because they do not look like brand names — they look like ordinary words. The unobvious choice is the one nobody else has tried because it does not feel like a brand at first.
Avoid the 'creative spelling' trap
If you find yourself adding a Y, dropping a vowel, or replacing a C with a K to make a taken name available, stop. Creative spellings cost you forever — they fail the radio test, fail the say-it-out-loud test, and require permanent customer education. The right move is not to torture a taken name into availability. It is to find a different name in one of the categories above. Your future self will thank you for not naming the company Krunchy.
Generate names that work — across 15 style categories.
Tell it what you are naming. Get 25-35 names with pronunciation guides, Name DNA explaining why each works, problem flags for foreign-language meanings, and live domain and social handle availability checks.