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For years, decades even, startup names have been getting weirder. This isn鈥檛 a scientific verdict, but it is how things have seemed to someone who spends a lot of hours perusing this stuff.

Startups have had a long run of branding themselves with creative misspellings, animal names, human first names, made-up words, adverbs, and other odd collections of letters. It鈥檚 gone on so long it now seems normal. Names like Google, Airbnb, and Hulu, which sounded strange at first, are now part of our everyday vocabulary.

Over the past few quarters, however, a peculiar thing has been happening: Startup founders are choosing more conventional-sounding names.

鈥淎s we reach the edge of strangeness鈥� they鈥檙e saying: ‘It鈥檚 too weird. I鈥檓 uncomfortable,’鈥� said Athol Foden, president of , a naming consultancy. While quirky startup monikers haven鈥檛 gone away, founders are increasingly comfortable with less unusual-sounding choices.

Foden鈥檚 observations are reflected in our annual 小蓝视频色情网页版 News survey of startup naming trends.* We鈥檙e seeing a proliferation of startups choosing simple words that describe their businesses, including companies like , an app for long-distance car rides, , a trip-booking startup named after the popular travel bag, and , a software development platform.

But fortunately for fans of offbeat names, the trend is only toward less weirdness, not no weirdness. Those who wish to patronage seed-stage startups can still buy tampons from , get parenting tips from an app called , or get insurance from a startup called .

Below, we look at some of the more popular startup naming practices and how they are trending in more detail.

Creativv MisPelling5

For a long time, it seemed like a vast number of startups selected names largely by disabling the spell checker.

Most desirable dictionary words were already in use as domains or too pricey to acquire. So founders took to dropping vowels, subbing a 鈥測鈥� for an 鈥渋鈥�, or adding an extra consonant to make it work. The strategy worked well for a lot of well-known companies, including Lyft, Tumblr, Digg, Flickr, Grindr, and Scribd.

These days, creative misspellings are still pretty common among early-stage founders. Our name survey unearthed a big number (see ) that recently raised funding, including , an upstart real estate brokerage, , developer of a kit for converting bikes to e-bikes, and , a provider of human resources and compliance software for the cannabis industry.

However, creative misspellings are getting less popular, Foden said. Early-stage founders are turned off by the prospect of having to spell out their names to people unfamiliar with the brand (which for seed-stage companies includes pretty much everyone).

Puns

One of the more fun naming styles is the pun. In our perusal of companies that raised seed funding in the past year, we came across a number of startups employing some sort of play on words.

We put together a list of seven of the punniest names . In addition to Aunt Flow, the list includes , a network of daycare providers, and , a digital content producer. 小蓝视频色情网页版 News also created its own fictional startup鈥攄rone chicken delivery startup Internet of Wings鈥�in an explainer series on startup funding.

Real companies with pun names that have matured to exit were harder to pinpoint. A couple that have gone public are Groupon and MedMen, a cannabis company that went public in Canada and is valued around CA$2 billion.

For some reason, it appears pun names are more popular in the brick-and-mortar world than the tech startup sphere. Restaurants specializing in the Vietnamese noodle soup Pho have dozens of play-on-word names memorialized in lists like . Ditto for .

Personally, I鈥檇 like to see more Internet startups rolling out pun-based names. Foden would, too, and he has even volunteered one suggestion for someone who wants to start a business applying artificial intelligence to artificial insemination: Ai.ai.

Made-Up Words That Sound Real

There are more than 170,000 non-obsolete words in the English language, per the Oxford English Dictionary. Startups, however, are convinced we need more.

Hence, one of the more enduringly popular businesses naming practices is to come up with something that sounds like an actual word, even if it isn鈥檛.

We put together a of this naming style among recently seed-funded startups.

It includes , which is building a platform to safeguard crypto assets, , a developer of voice design tools for Alexa apps, and , which focuses on autonomous trucking technology.

Naming advisors like to see the made-up word name trend on the rise, Foden said, because it鈥檚 the kind of thing companies pay a consultant to figure out. Another advantage is it鈥檚 easier to top search results for a made-up word.

Normal-Sounding Names

Lastly, let鈥檚 look at those rebel startups choosing familiar dictionary words for their names.

We put together a list of some . Besides the aforementioned Duffel, Hitch, and Coder, there鈥檚 , a healthcare startup, , a women鈥檚 networking group, , a note organizing tool, and many more.

Startups are less concerned than they used to be with snagging a dot-com domain that contains just their name. Commonly, they鈥檒l add a prefix to their domain (joinchief.com, usejournal.com), choose an alternate domain (Hitch.net), or both.

Overall, Foden said, startups today are putting less emphasis on securing a dot-com suffix or an exact domain name match. Google parent Alphabet, in particular, made the alternate domain idea more palatable. It helped to see one of the world’s richest corporations forego Alphabet.com in favor of abc.xyz.

Where Is It All Going?

They say history repeats itself. If so, perhaps some day business naming will harken back to the industrial age, when corporate titans had exceedingly boring and obvious names like Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, and General Electric.

For now, however, we live in era in which the most valuable companies have names like Google and Facebook. And to us, they sound perfectly normal.

Methodology: For the naming dataset, we looked primarily at companies in English-speaking countries that raised seed funding after 2018. To broaden the potential list of names, we also included some companies funded in 2017. We also tried to limit the lists, where possible to companies founded in the past three years, although there were occasional exceptions.

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