The greatest company name generator ever invented

There are a lot of company name generators out there. Pick a few prefixes and buzzwords and ta-da: 20 crappy name options. If you’ve ever used any of them you realize pretty quickly that you’ll probably have better luck finding a name by throwing darts at the phone book. Anyway, along comes a team of highly skilled engineers looking to name their new company. Being engineers, they try to engineer a solution. They set out to build a company name generator.

Chris Maguire, one of these engineers, describes the beast:

“…we set about writing a complicated name-generation script. It would perform the following operations:

1. Pull a list of all available 4-letter domain names from ICANN
2. Utilize a custom Bayesian-inspired algorithm to detect phonetically pronounceable words
3. Cross-reference the list with popular search term data from Google to identify trending suffixes
4. Take the 25 highest-ranking terms and present them in a survey to 1000 people via Mechanical Turk to determine which they liked the best”

Sounds like one hell of a name generator, right? Problem is, they never actually got it to work. They had nicknamed the script Etsy and decided to stick with it when they couldn’t get their company name generator to work.

But here’s the brilliant part: Maguire says, “We then made a founder’s pact to give a different origin story for the site’s name every time someone asked about it.”

So maybe there wasn’t a generator after all. Maybe it happened as co-founder Rob Kalin describes it. “I was watching Fellini’s 8½ and writing down what I was hearing. In Italian, you say ‘etsi’ a lot. It means ‘oh, yes.’ And in Latin, it means ‘and if.'”

Who knows which story is true. Who knows if this highly-engineered name generator ever existed. ‘Etsy’ on its own is a pretty boring name. Sure it’s short and a little cute, but it doesn’t communicate much of anything. The story around the name, however, is fascinating. It has mystery and intrigue. It has dead ends and conflicting reports. It makes you want to search for the truth. In the end, the story is what gives your name legs. And more often than not, saying you used a company name generator isn’t the start to a great story.

This is because names are supposed to be about connecting with people. Good names grab your attention. They’re memorable because they ask something of you – they make you think. Nothing about jamming little word fragments through a few algorithms will lead you to a name that connects with people. The founders of Etsy figured that out … or maybe they didn’t.

Thanks to @andybosselman for bringing the Etsy naming myth to our attention.

If you want to hear about our robot and algorithm-free naming process check out www.ahundredmonkeys.com/naming/