The naming rules that are wrong

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 rules you will find on the first page of almost any search about naming. Each is either measuring the wrong thing, based on an event that did not happen, or pointing in the opposite direction from the law it claims to be about. One rule at the end survives.

1. "Keep it to two or three syllables"

A 2026 study of brand-name length by Zee, Willems, Brengman and Desmet (cited DOI 10.1057/s41262-026-00436-0; summarized in 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 failing in obvious places. 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 went looking for the study behind those numbers and could not find one. The figures appear on guide pages with no citation to any published research. Treat them as marketing copy, not evidence.

What to do instead: count phonemes, not syllables. If you want a single number, that is the one with a study behind it.

2. "Shorter is more memorable"

The same study complicates this one, and the complication is the interesting part. The findings split depending on which outcome you are measuring:

"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.

We will take a position rather than leave that as a shrug. 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, and the short-name advice is right. It is right for a reason nobody states, though, and 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 study reports both effects but, as far as we can tell from the summary, does not locate the point at which one overtakes the other.

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. A real disaster of the same genre exists in the same source: Braniff Airlines ran a Spanish-language campaign meant to say "fly in leather" that landed as "fly naked." Cross-language screening is a genuinely worthwhile step. But the case for it has been carried for forty years by an anecdote that is not true, which means most people doing the screening are pattern-matching against a fiction, looking for accidental phrases in the spelling rather than for real collisions in real languages.

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

Almost every practitioner source, academic and commercial alike, independently arrives at the same 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, which is probably why it does not travel as well as the syllable rule. But it has something better: near-total agreement among people who name things professionally, and it is the only test on this page that is free, takes ten minutes, and produces a number. One person on Hacker News proposed running it with about ten people and treating roughly 90% accuracy in both directions as the bar, which is as good a threshold as any published one.

It also catches the failure the other rules are proxies for. A name that survives the round trip is pronounceable and spellable, which is most of what "memorable" is actually doing in a sentence. The rules above are all attempts to predict that outcome from the spelling. This one just measures it.