The doctrine, end to end

The hardest rule, above all others. NEVER settle for a generic, category-descriptive, sounds-professional name. Keystone / Meridian / Summit / Vantage / Vertex / Zenith / Atelier / Foundry / Cornerstone / any holding-Latin-mush = BANNED even when they clear every other gate — clearing the gates is the FLOOR, not the bar. The bar is GREAT: a name carrying a story, a POV, an unexpected pairing, a cultural-or-mythic reference that a client leans in and asks about, then repeats. Benchmarks: ByteDance · Bending Spoons.

The name must express the ACTIVITY — what the business DOES — not the location of incorporation or the founder's geography. ByteDance is Chinese but named for its activity, not "China". Never wear HK / China / Orient / Pearl / Jade / Cathay / Kowloon / Silk / Eastern / Monsoon labels just because that is where the paperwork sits. NAME THE VERB.

Invented/coined sounds read elvish-fantasy-geek and land COLD on a real adult business person. Regno / Aurel / Novar / Auren / Embra / Valen / Velor / Solen / Ryven — and the parfum-Latin Noirael / Aurvex / Noctavo / Sovaria / Ictova batch — all failed here: they mean nothing, evoke no image. Warm names are made of REAL, RECOGNISABLE WORDS that fire a concrete image the moment they are heard (a lotus in bloom; bytes dancing).

When one half is a tech word, the WORD CHOICE decides geek vs mogul. Use broad, warm tech words an adult instantly pictures — pixel, signal, data, cloud, code, stream, pulse, wave, spark, current, digital, vector — NOT programmer jargon (kernel, hash, node, socket, cache, buffer, daemon, packet, root, commit, deploy).

Trying to sound powerful is the tell of the geeky kid who "wants to reign over the world". Flex words are BANNED as the soul-half: Reign, Crown, Throne, Empire, Dominion, Sovereign, Rule, Iron, Prime, Apex, Titan, Force, Power, Supreme, Elite, Alpha. The truly iconic names are laidback — ByteDance, Google, Amazon, Apple, Stripe, Meta, Uber — they never announce power, they imply it.

The first filter run on every candidate. Say it ONCE on a phone; the listener must write it correctly with zero spelling help. ONE WORD ONLY (or a tight two-ultra-common-word compound). AUTO-FAIL: multi-word phrases · idiom-sentences · "The X of Y" · verb phrases · homophone-ambiguous letters (c/k/s, ph/f, -le/-el/-al, i/y) · silent letters · accents. A plain writable name beats a clever unwritable one every time.

AI namers do linguistic averaging: every output is short, punchy, vaguely technical, ending in a vowel or an x, or an [Adjective][Noun] compound (NovaTech / BrightPath / SwiftFlow). Documented-saturated 2026 tokens to AVOID: Nova · Flux · Pulse · Nexus/Nexum · Atlas · Orbit · Vectra/Vanta-class · Synth · Neural · Axera. THE TEST: would an off-the-shelf AI generator have produced this from a one-line brief? If yes = slop, kill it.

A bare brand name is a zero-context read, and the DOMINANT (most frequent everyday) sense of each word wins the race. billing → invoices (not theatre credits); market → finance (not the town square). The intended read must BE the buyer's dominant everyday read. Operationalised by the cold-read probe (zero-context, third-person, ≥3 model families).

The name must read WARM and human to a non-tech regular person (a hairdresser, a shop owner — the actual buyer), not tech-SaaS-clever. Moldus do not buy workflow, they buy friendly help.

Extends 0f: the spoken form must map to exactly ONE obvious spelling; a silent/dropped-vowel trap = fail (mane heard as "man" → manflo). Check the organic typo variant too: if users will mistype it, the wrong form must not be a competitor's domain.

The killer gate. Say it out loud to a REAL client — "you'll see a charge from ______". The name must sound like a credible BUSINESS SERVICE on a card statement, not a consumer product. (Belvolta = water bottle · Medaljet = printer · Titanwon = crypto casino · Drumnova = music startup.)

The automano law: every syllable must MEAN something (auto+mano = car+hand; hs+mate = HS-code+helper ≈ checkmate). Filler suffixes (-ano, -ora, -ify, -ly bolted on) = instant fail.

Spellable on first hearing over the phone. Kills x/q clusters, Latin coinages, ambiguous c/s, obscure words.

Made of simple international words (A1/A2: top, gold, star, king, fame, bell, medal, drum) or a perfectly phonetic coinage. Kills hawk-class words ESL buyers cannot picture or spell.

Say it with a French ear. Kills Saymont (≈saumon/salmon), TopSaid ("said" reads the Arabic name Saïd), Salvolta ("sale" = dirty). Any comic or off homophone in French = dead.

The initial letter carries the trust register: Z opens edgy/gaming/crypto; soft-solid initials (B, M, V, S, F, L) open trust. Match the initial to the register.

TLD per RANKED_TLD_POLICY: .com default > <name>qualifier.com > .ai for AI-native > .io dev-only > .co weak; blacklist .xyz/.org/.net/novelty as a brand. ≤8 LETTERS (soft — 9-10 if genuinely distinctive), letters only, one word. Compounds: BOTH parts ≥3 letters AND both real meaningful words; 4+4 balanced splits beat 3+5.

Descriptive compounds read tool/SaaS (caps pricing power); pretty coinages read consumer/FMCG (fail the invoice test). Pick the register from the BUYER/brand-type BEFORE generating.

Replace the name with a competitor's in your messaging — if it still works, the name is generic.

The hsmate winner-factor: a play the listener gets free (hsmate ≈ checkmate) = zero marketing budget to explain. ⚠️ Polarity condition: the play only counts if gate 0h passes — both senses positive AND the dominant everyday sense is the intended one.

If a stranger cannot pronounce it correctly on first sight of the written word, kill it. Alter & Oppenheimer: fluently-named stocks measurably outperformed disfluent ones post-IPO. No "it's pronounced…" brands, no misspelled real words.

A name that survives list review can die instantly IN SITU — render finalists on a mock page/logo/invoice before locking. Cheapest gate with the highest observed save.

Can you OWN the name's SERP and be entity-unambiguous to LLMs? Google it AND ask 2-3 LLMs "what is <name>?" pre-commit. Dictionary/common words (Apex, Nova, Orbit) are high-collision: the model resolves to a clearer, better-known entity.

Name the OUTCOME/promise, not the mechanism. Bonus: narrative scaling — prefer a name that auto-writes future messaging.

Match mouth-feel to positioning: front vowels i/e = small/fast/light/sharp; back vowels o/u/a = big/rich/smooth/powerful. Plosives p/b/t/d/k/g = impact; fricatives f/v/s/z = speed/elegance. v = alive, b = reliable, z = attention, x = innovation.

Map competitors on the taxonomy Functional → Invented → Experiential → Evocative and name where the category ISN'T. Lexicon's polarisation signal: a name everyone is instantly comfortable with is wallpaper. NEVER focus-group a name.

Native-speaker check in EVERY launch language. Mandarin + Cantonese are MANDATORY on any Latin name, and Cantonese is checked SEPARATELY from Mandarin. The disaster mode in Chinese is almost always homophonic, not semantic.