How Many Possible Trade Names are There?

ABSTRACT

The number of possible distinct names of reasonable length is necessarily finite, and with the heavy demand for new names in some areas of current English-speaking commerce it seems possible that the supply might approach exhaustion. Numbers of possibilities cannot be calculated exactly, because most wordforms theoretically allowed by English phonology are too clumsy to be usable. However, Monte Carlo methods permit estimates of numbers of names which are plausible by present-day standards. These estimates suggest that the prospect of “running out of names” may not be merely fanciful.

Acknowledgement

I have no financial or similar interest in possible applications of this research.

Notes

¹ It is perhaps inappropriate to call a generic drug name a “trade name”. But the issue we are concerned with is the supply of new names in general; my title refers to trade names, because it is chiefly commerce which is revealing the limits to that supply.

² The names capitalized here are believed to be registered proprietary names, and the respective owners’ rights are hereby acknowledged. Later in this article, many examples of hypothetical trade names will be cited; so far as the author knows, none of these are actually in use, but he apologizes in advance if, unknown to him, any of them should coincide with real proprietary names.

³ This issue is only partly a matter of the intrinsic “alienness” of sounds. J’adore is evidently acceptable although initial /Z-/ does not occur in English. On the other hand the popular Korean car marque Hyundai (Sino-Korean 現代 /hjɤndæ/, “modern”) seems invariably to be pronounced in English as three syllables, /haIVndaI/, even though /hj/ is a normal English initial sequence (huge, humour). Relevant factors in this case are probably that English /hj/ is not spelled using the letter y, and also that to English-speakers French is a much more familiar language than Korean.

⁴ One might object that this is not entirely true, if we consider devices like the Mondelēz macron. But, apart from the fact that this orthography is a large departure from the norms of English naming, I surmise that Mondelēz would not be happy if a competitor named itself Mondelĕz, and pointed to the breve to establish that its name was different because pronounced with /-lEz/ rather than /li:z/. In practice, identity of letter-sequences is probably a sufficient condition for perceived identity of names.

⁵ The irregularity of English spelling means that perfect reliability is not achievable.

⁶ In RP English, a postvocalic /r/ is realized as modification of the quality of the preceding vowel, e.g. the sequence treated for present purposes as /kard/ card is pronounced [kA:d]. But our calculations will be simplified by treating postvocalic /r/ as a separate phoneme, as it is in General American English.

⁷ The phrase “visual CVCV violation” may be misleading. The reason why the graphones listed above tend to reduce the plausibility of wordforms containing them may not be that alternation of consonant and vowel letters is somehow “natural”, but that long English words usually have classical derivations, and the reason why some sounds are spelled with digraphs in English is that those sounds did not occur in the classical languages and hence were not provided with single letters in the alphabet which we inherited from the Romans and, ultimately, from the Greeks. Be that as it may, experimentation shows that including this factor improves the alignment between numerical counts of “CVCV violations” and perceived implausibility of wordforms.

⁸ One might think that the threshold should be defined relative to wordform-length, with more violations acceptable in long wordforms. However, a little experimentation has suggested to me that absolute number of violations is the more important factor in deciding how realistic a graphone-sequence feels as a potential name.

⁹ The total number of pronounceable wordforms having s syllables is (c + 1) . v . (cv)^s–1 . (c – 2), where c is the number of single consonants excluding /S C J N T/ (i.e. 17) and v is 5 as before. The terms c + 1 and c – 2 refer to the fact that a word can begin or end with a vowel, but cannot end with any of the consonants /h j w/.

¹⁰ The exception is Phenylalanine mustard; phenylalanine has five syllables. But although the two-word phrase is evidently a proprietary name, phenylalanine is a formal chemical name, and such words belong to a system of their own in which commercial considerations such as memorability play little part. Many names of chemicals are much longer than five syllables. I do not see this single case as strong evidence for counting wordforms longer than four syllables as plausible trade names.

¹¹ Worapong Smithirittha quoting Dun & Bradstreet data on Quora,<www.quora.com/How-many-companies-there-are-in-the-world>, dated 8th November 2014, accessed 28th November 2015.