Ah, Valentine’s Day — the perfect occasion for contemplating love, romance, and names. Yes, names. If you’re struggling to find a corporate name, product name, or book title you can fall in love with, here’s some advice from a pro: Forget “passion.” Forget “chemistry.” Forget “perfect harmony.” Yes, forget about…

In some ways, naming a startup is easy: you have a blank slate and nothing but potential. Renaming an established company or product can be a trickier proposition. Your customers and employees know you by the original name, and selling them on a new name can be costly, arduous, and…

Creating a memorable brand name takes time, patience, imagination, acumen, and a feel for language. It may also require a look in the mirror. It turns out there’s a connection between personal names and brand names. And there’s a name for this connection: implicit egotism. …

Throughout the U.S. and around the world, dictionaries, publications, and linguistic societies are announcing their word-of-the-year choices, from vaccine to NFT to allyship. I have a nomination, too: Big Lie, a two-word phrase that has dominated our national conversation in 2021 in ways both obvious and insidious. A big lie…

The ski resort on the California side of Lake Tahoe had a problem. Not lack of snow, although that is indeed a worry in this era of Western drought and wildfires. Not lack of customers, either. The resort opened in 1949 and became famous as the center of the 1960…

I lived for a couple of years in Israel, when the country and I were both much younger. I studied Hebrew for five months with an international group of émigrés, refugees, and wayfarers, and then I took a series of office jobs in Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem. My spoken…

Amid the news about the unspooling disaster in Afghanistan, one name keeps surfacing in my Twitter feed along with the names of the U.S. presidents who had perpetuated our “forever war” since 2001: Blackwater. It’s curious, because the company once known as Blackwater hasn’t officially had that name since 2009…

And why you shouldn’t expect a free business name — I joined Quora, the question-and-answer website, in 2015, full of good will and the desire to share advice about the naming process: how to write a naming brief, why trademark is important, how sound symbolism works. It didn’t take long for me to realize that questioners weren’t looking for a…

If your company or product were a person, what kind of person would it be? Reserved or bubbly? Impetuous or deliberate? Cute or stately? A poet or a lumberjack? Now: How well does your company or product name reflect that personality? This isn’t a trivial exercise. Identifying your brand’s personality…