Here's a little quiz to test your knowledge of color names. Can you identify where on the spectrum these colors — all of them well documented, some of them brand-specific — are located? 1. Inch Worm, 2. Dead Spaniard, 3. Isabella, 4. I'm Not Really a Waitress, 5. Synergy.  Continue reading...

What's not to like about a big, roomy vehicle that can carry the kids, the dog, the groceries, and a team's worth of soccer equipment? Plenty not to like, as it turns out — if you call that vehicle a minivan, a word that's become burdened by associations with boring family life in the suburbs.  Continue reading...

Irregular spellings are old news in brand names. Lately, though, I’ve noticed an interesting new spelling trend: the doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling of one particular letter—F—at the beginning of the name.

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The year is still young, but I’m prepared to go out on a limb and declare 2011 the Year of the Q-Name. From Quid to Quora, from Qajack to Qire, from Qrank to Qponomics, Q names are the queens and kings (qings?) of contemporary naming. Evidence? On CrunchBase, a directory of technology companies, I counted 405 Q names. And that was after eliminating companies that incorporate place names like Qatar and Qingdao.  Continue reading...

At the 2011 Detroit Auto Show, Toyota is taking a poll to determine what the plural of "Prius" should be. It's all part of their "Prius goes plural" ad campaign, as they unveil three new Prius models. The Detroit Free Press consulted with some experts, including Visual Thesaurus editor Ben Zimmer, to get their take on how to pluralize the Latin-sounding car name.  Continue reading...

On The Economist's Johnson blog, contributors are considering the question of why we "Google" and "Facebook," but we don't "PowerPoint" or "Excel." They've proposed some reasonable theories for brand-verbing.  Continue reading...