Fritinancy

Names That End in -ly: Not Just for Startups

I’ve written several times this year about the proliferation of startup names that end in -ly: Chirply, Erply, Forkly, Womply, Grammarly, et al. (You can read all of my -ly posts here.) Just last week I just learned of a new entrant in this dubious sweepstakes: Burstly, “the leading app monetization platform.”

Now it turns out that there’s been a parallel trend in baby naming. The Nameberry baby-names blog included it among its “Baby Trends 2012: 12 Hottest Trends” roundup:

Name Trend Ready to Jump the Shark**: The -ley names

We liked Hadley, name of Hemingway's sympathetic first wife. And Huxley, Ridley, and Radley, as in Aldous, Scott and Boo, were all intriguing. But the trend toward tacking an -ley onto the end of a wide range of first syllables and calling it a name --- Brinley, Kinley, Finley, endlessly --- became so pandemic so quickly that we are ready to declare it over already.

These names are spelled with -ley, not –ly, but sonically there’s no distinction. Throw in Lily, Riley/Ryleigh, Hayley, Carly, and Emily—all of which have surged within the last five years, according to Name Voyager—and the trend becomes even more evident.

Trends in company names and baby names don’t always track this closely, so when they do it’s worth paying attention. The last confluence I can recall occurred back in 2007, when “K” names were popular across the board; a year or two earlier, when the first generation of Web 2.0 startups had names like Meebo and DimDim, we also saw a spate of reduplicative or near-reduplicative baby names like Coco (born to actress Courteney Cox in 2004), Lola (which spiked in the Name Voyager graph in the early 2000s), Emma, Fifi, and Lulu.

In 2010 and 2011 the torch was passed to the -ly/-ley crowd. Overnight, it seemed, adverbial-style names sounded fresh, modern, and unique: in a word, nameworthy. Of course, they aren’t unique at all—I’ve tallied almost 50 newish company names that end in -ly—and in a few years they’ll all sound fusty and dated. Right now they just sound like clones.

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*If you don’t understand “jump the shark,” read this.

Nameberry post via this tweet from @Nameflash.

The Unbearable Redundancy of -ly

I’d hoped never to revisit the subject of -ly names, which I covered—exhaustively, I thought—in an August post that listed 29 such names, including Chirply, Erply, Zerply, and Estately. But a news item on TechCrunch today makes a follow-up inevitable, if not welcome.

The item: Enterprise applications and services company Infor has paid $100,000 for Local.ly. “.ly” is the country code for Libya.

The same post noted that Facebook last month paid an undisclosed sum for Friend.ly.

Adverb-style names: the trend without end.

More evidence: Twitter friend Anthony recently pointed me to 500 Startups, which provides seed funding for new companies. Anthony wanted me to check out those companies’ names. “Brace yourself,” he warned.

Indeed. The companies themselves may be innovative, but you’d never know it from their names. We’re still seeing droppd vowls (Forrst, GoVoluntr, Redeemr, Spinnakr), diacritical abuse (Cădee, a golf site), multiple Dailys (DailyAisle, DailyGobble, DailyWorth), and -ly names. Lots of -ly names. (And one “-li” name.)

The 500 Startups roster includes:

Central.ly, “connecting local businesses to the web.”

Contactually, “an email interface for your CRM.”

Graphic.ly “provides an immersive social experience and marketplace around digital comics and associated merchandise.”

Lovely “takes the frustration out of your apartment hunt.” (I’ve included this -ly name even though it’s an adjective, not an adverb. To me it suggests a fashion or beauty site—or online dating—rather than “this lovely apartment.”)

Recurly “gracefully handles all the complexities of subscription billing and recurring payments.”

Rewardli “lets self-employed and small business owners leverage the buying power in their social networks so they can get better deals on the products and services they need.”

Texting.ly “enables businesses to easily and inexpensively interact.”

More evidence: Last week I read on TechCrunch about Womply (“Amazing offers loaded to your credit cards”). Womply has a cartoon mascot, Mr. Wombat. I can’t explain the shift from B to P; I’m guessing “Wombly” would have risked sounding like an obstetrics service.

Last week also brought news, via email, of Grammarly, which calls itself “the world’s best grammar checker,” an audacious assertion that remains to be proved. I ran a short passage from one of my recent blog posts through Grammarly; it dinged me on “passive voice use” and “writing style” without telling me why. If anyone’s tried the service and has good (or bad) things to say about it, please let me know.

And still more: Book.ly calls itself “the better way to buy textbooks.” Posterly has something to do with posters, events, and venues, but the writing is so vague and amateurish I couldn’t tell for sure. (“Browse posters, listen and see where it’s going on” does not tell me anything I need to know. “It”?)

Finally—or so one hopes—there’s Yummly (“Every recipe in the world”). The enterprise is well funded, the site is attractively designed, and the brand is cleverly extended (the blog is called “Nibbles & Bits”), but the name is, um, repeating on me.

If you’re keeping score, we’re up to 43 -ly names.

UPDATE: In a comment, Risa reminds us about this Tom Lehrer song for The Electric Company.

UPDATE #2, Nov. 11: Oh look, another -ly startup: Giftly.

The last laugh belongs to Jotly (“Rate Everything”), a fake and very funny enterprise from Firespotter Labs. Jotly’s home page declares “Everything about your life is exciting. To everyone.” The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal notes that the Jotly video “manages to send up nearly every startup cliché in just two minutes.” See for yourself:

More -ly

The little adverbial suffix is really getting around in startup-land. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about 27 company names that end in –ly or dot-ly (the Libyan country code). Here are three more I recently discovered.

Versly calls itself “a better way to work together” inside Microsoft Office. The San Francisco startup (started by a team “comprised of [no! no! no!] serial entrepreneurs and rockstar talent,” just like all Bay Area startups) was recently acquired by Cisco but appears to be keeping its unexplained name.

Forkly is a new iPhone app that “shows you where to go and what’s tasty there.”

Erply sounds like a symptom of gastric distress—perhaps what you’d say after being too successful with Forkly—but it isn’t: it’s a new credit-card-payment system for the iPad. Before the recent launch of that application, Erply, which sometimes likes to spell its name in ALL CAPS, provided business-management services to small companies. Erply was founded in Estonia in 2009, but “ERP” isn’t Estonian: its an acronym for enterprise resource planning.

Then there’s a red herring: Zerply, “a professional network built around people who love what they do.”

One of the founders, Christofer Karltorp, is Swedish; another, Taaniel Jakobs, is Estonian. (Does “urply” sound particularly euphonious in Estonian? Anyone?) Adverbs were not on their minds, according to the About page:

The name Zerply, which is derived from serious play, came to C and T in the wee hours of the night in Tallinn in the summer of -09.

Got that? They somehow elided “serious play”—charmingly accented, no doubt—into “Zerply.” Which does not sound like either “serious” or “play” to a native speaker of English. No, it just sounds like another dumb portmanteau. Go figurely.

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Hat tip to Karen for the Zerply lead.

Truly, Madly, Domainly

Call it the redundancy of crowds. A few years ago, all the cool startups wanted baby-talk names: Meemo, Meebo, Bebo, ooVoo, Kwout, YooGuu, Doof, Thoof. Not in 2011: this is the year of naming adverbially. Some of the adverbish domains use the Libyan country code, .ly; others are .coms that incorporate –ly into their names. There are a lot of them, and what may have seemed like a clever idea at first—verbs! action! it’s how we do stuff!—is looking like a sad insufficiency of imagination.

The curious thing about naming trends is that none of the responsible parties ever thinks his name is a trend-follower. Oh no, every name is a true original! And ours is the best! Sure enough, when I singled out a few –ly names on Twitter, I got copycat responses: “But our name is cute!” “At least __ly has a double meaning!” “__ly is a great name! And we are dot com, not dot ly!” Sigh.

If you’re considering an –ly name for your new business, perhaps this list of 27 –ly names will convince you that it’s not very distinctive after all. By the way, I’ve omitted the –ly names already at the bottom of the dead pool: Slantly, Quotably, Smak.ly, Seriesly, et al.