At Lifehacker we love a portmanteau. A lot of our sister sites, as well as their subdomains, are combinations of existing words: Deadspin evokes backspin but also ESPN; Gizmodo contains gizmo and mod. Lifehacker’s subsites find a second meaning within a word or phrase: Skillet contains skill, Two Cents is money advice. We’ve covered some great tools for inventing pun names before. Now there’s Entendrepreneur, a powerful tool for combining any two concepts into a portmanteau or a rhyme.
Enter two words into Entendrepreneur, and it will look for related words for both of them. Then it will try to match up those words, using any overlapping syllables to make a portmanteau. It also lists rhyming word pairs, which are a little easier to mentally process. Either way, you can find a clever name for your website, product, business, or other project.
For example, say you want to pitch my services as a handyman, a home expert, some sort of Dr. Fix-it. Repair and expert gives you the succinct fixpert.
Maybe you’ve invented a water bottle optimised for athletes. Exercise plus water gives you Trainwater, Jogua (jog and agua!), or the rhyme Train Rain.
You’ll also get a lot of unwieldy or irrelevant combos — treadmillectricity, prerogativeaporation — but Entenrepreneur usually ranks the shorter, relevant words highest.
What’s particularly powerful about this tool is that it finds related words on its own. It covers much more ground than if you needed to look up each specific word. If you come up with a word list first, and try all the combinations you can think of, you’ll get a wide range of options.
If you spend enough time doing this, you’ll lose your grip on common sense and language, adrift on a sea of syllables. Once you’ve found your top contenders, run them by some other people immediately. Don’t give yourself time to fall in love with a too-clever portmanteau, or else you’ll be devastated when someone reacts to it with, “I don’t get it.”
MetaFilter)
Comments