NAMES

The Sound of a Name

If you’ve ever named a company or a product, you’ve probably thought about the meaning, spelling, and availability of the names on your list. Here’s something else you should consider: the way the name sounds — and what that sound symbolizes.

Sound symbolism is the phenomenon by which certain units of sound seem inherently associated with certain kinds of information. The association is mostly unconscious; it isn’t infallible, but it often exerts an effect, subtle or powerful, on our perception of a brand name.

Here’s an example from a classic experiment. In 2001, two psychologists asked people to assign one of two made-up names, “bouba” and “kiki,” to a couple of geometric shapes. Which was which?

They repeated the experiment with English-speaking American college students and with Tamil speakers in India. In both cases, 95 percent of those surveyed said the spiky shape was a “kiki” and the rounded shape was a “bouba.” A later study found that children as young as two and a half, who could not have been influenced by the appearance of the words and their letterforms, gave the same responses.

These associations seem to be hard wired into our brains. As the linguist Gaston Dorren writes in Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages:

There is a well-documented tendency for humans worldwide to associate low, open vowels such as /ah/ with bigness — words like vast and large fit the bill, as does yang — and high, closed vowels such as /ee/…