Five naming rules worth questioning

Naming advice is one of the most heavily copied genres on the internet. That matters more than it sounds, because copying preserves a rule whether or not anyone ever checked it. A heuristic that someone invented in a 2011 blog post gets restated a thousand times, and the thousandth restatement reads as consensus.

Below are five common rules that deserve more scrutiny than they usually get. Some measure the wrong thing. One rests on a story that did not happen. Another confuses a domain workaround with legal distinctiveness. A practical test at the end survives with fewer promises attached to it.

1. "Keep it to two or three syllables"

A 2026 policy brief summarizes research on brand-name length by Zee, Willems, Brengman and Desmet (cited DOI 10.1057/s41262-026-00436-0; VUB SMIT Policy Brief 94) puts it plainly:

"Phonemic length provides a more precise measure of brand name length than syllable count."

The brief's own worked example is the clearest way to see why. Lee is two phonemes. Dell is three. Both are one syllable, so the syllable rule cannot tell them apart at all, while by the measure that predicts the outcome, Dell is fifty percent longer than Lee.

Once you notice this, the syllable rule starts losing useful detail. Strength is one syllable and seven phonemes. Ikea is three syllables and four phonemes. A rule that files Strength and Lee under the same verdict is not looking at the thing it claims to measure.

There is a specific statistic that travels with this rule and deserves to be named. Guides quote figures like "89% recall after a single exposure" for short names against "23%" for names of five or more syllables. We looked through the sources that repeat those numbers and did not find a published study behind them. Until one turns up, treat them as marketing copy, not evidence.

What to do instead: if you want a length measure, count phonemes as well as syllables. It preserves differences that syllable count throws away. It still does not produce a universal score for a good name.

2. "Shorter is more memorable"

The same policy brief complicates this one. Its summary splits the findings depending on which outcome is being measured:

"Shorter names of 3–4 phonemes are associated with the most favourable attitudes," but "recognition improves as non-word brand names become longer."

Those pull in opposite directions. Short names are better liked. Longer invented names are better recognized. "Shorter is more memorable" quietly assumes those are the same outcome, and they are not.

For most people reading this (naming something nobody has encountered yet, where every impression is a first impression), attitude is the outcome that is actually in play, so a shorter name is a reasonable default. The reason is what tells you when to break it: the moment your problem shifts from being liked to being picked out of a field of similar names by people who have seen you before, the finding inverts and length starts working for you.

What to do instead: default to short, and treat it as a default rather than a law. What would change our answer is evidence on where the crossover sits. The summary reports both effects but does not show where one overtakes the other. That boundary needs the full paper, not a guess from the abstract.

3. "Remember what happened to the Chevy Nova"

It did not happen.

The story — that Chevrolet sold the Nova in Latin America and failed because Spanish speakers heard no va, "doesn't go" — is the single most repeated cautionary tale in naming, and it is folklore. Per Deseret News's debunking roundup:

"No record exists of a campaign to sell Novas in any Latin American country and, even if the alleged campaign had existed, it probably would not have flopped due to its moniker."

The second half is the part worth sitting with. Even granting the premise, the mechanism is not plausible: nova is a Spanish word, and a fluent speaker no more parses it as no va than an English speaker hears "not able" inside "notable." The analogy turned up, unimprovable, in a r/todayilearned thread on exactly this myth.

Here is why the correction matters rather than just being a fun fact. Cross-language screening is still worthwhile. The Nova story is a bad model for it because it trains people to hunt for accidental phrases in the spelling instead of asking fluent speakers about real meaning, pronunciation and use.

What to do instead: screen against actual wordlists in the languages of markets you will actually be in. Flag, do not auto-reject, and keep the source of the flag visible. Screening built on folklore finds folklore-shaped problems.

4. "Say what you do — and add 'Co' or 'Labs' to make it yours"

Both halves of this point away from legal distinctiveness, which is the thing the advice is usually invoked to protect.

U.S. trademark law sorts marks along the Abercrombie spectrum, and the USPTO states the ranking without hedging:

"Strong trademarks are suggestive, fanciful, or arbitrary. Weak trademarks are descriptive or generic."

Fanciful means invented (Exxon, Pepsi), words with no meaning except in relation to the goods. Arbitrary means a real word with no connection to the product, like Apple for computers. Suggestive hints at a quality without stating it, like Coppertone. A name that says what you do is, by construction, in the weak half.

Founders discover it late, usually at the moment they try to stop someone else from using something similar and find they have very little to work with.

The suffix half is more clear-cut still. As a practitioner put it bluntly in r/TRADEMARK:

"Adding a company suffix like 'Co' will not make the mark distinctive."

Appending Co, Labs, HQ or App to a descriptive name gets you a domain. It does not move you up the spectrum. Those are two different problems that happen to be solved by typing in the same box, which is exactly why they get confused.

What to do instead: treat descriptiveness as a cost you are choosing, not a safety feature. And note the obvious caveat: this is a way to think about a shortlist, not a legal opinion. Anything you intend to build on needs an attorney.

5. "The naming agencies have science for this"

This one requires a careful split, because the honest answer is partly.

The underlying phenomenon is real. Sound symbolism — the finding that particular vowels and consonants carry consistent connotations of size, speed and weight — traces to Sapir in 1929 and has been replicated widely since, including work specifically on brand names by Klink (2000) and Yorkston and Menon (2004). It is one of the better-established findings in the area.

What is not established is the layer sold on top of it. Lexicon Branding — a genuinely accomplished agency, behind Swiffer, BlackBerry, Pentium and others — markets "proprietary sound-symbolism software" and letter-level claims of the form V is the most alive sound, sourced to a large unpublished internal research program (Lenny's Newsletter). That is practitioner pattern-matching from proprietary data. It may well be right. It is not peer-reviewed, the methodology is not disclosed, and it cannot be checked by anyone outside the firm.

The distinction is not pedantic, because the two get quoted in the same sentence. A blog post cites the academic finding to establish that sound symbolism is real, then borrows the agency's specific letter claims under the credibility that citation just bought. The general effect is evidence. The specific letter is a house style.

What to do instead: use the direction, distrust the decimal. That front vowels read smaller and faster than back vowels is a usable prior. That a specific consonant is the reliable one is not a finding you can check.

The rule that survives

Practitioners regularly recommend the same simple test: say the name out loud to someone who has never seen it, and have them write it down. Then show it written to someone else and have them say it.

It has no famous study attached. Treat it as a cheap usability test, not a validated threshold. Run it with several people, keep the wrong spellings and pronunciations, and look at the pattern rather than forcing a pass score.

It catches a failure the other rules are often trying to predict. A name that survives the round trip is easier to pronounce and spell from a first exposure. That is narrower than memorability, and useful on its own.