Does Your Name Pass the Autocorrect Test?

Let’s say you picked up your friend’s tab at the bar last night because he was short on cash. Like a lot of Snake Peo Millennials, you both use Venmo, so you decide to send him a text asking him nicely to pay up. Then you hit send, but just before your message travels through the tubes, you see this:

Congratulations, you appear to have used broken English to ask for cash to finance a chemical weapon, and are now on a certain list the NSA keeps for “national security reasons.” Also, your friend has no idea what’s going on.

You’re not alone. At this very moment, people are baffling each other by attempting to text oddball company names. To show how rampant this problem is, we’ve made the following list. While it’s not exhaustive, it should illustrate what we’re talking about:

Waze → Wake

Lyft → Lift

Shyp → Ship

Postmates → Postdates

please tip for emotional labor

Vungle → Jungle

Hulu → Julian

Zynga → Syngas

Twillio → Trillion

Vitamix → Vitamin

Everlane → Everyone

Expensify → Expensing

Zoho → Zoo

Songza → Song and

Udemy → Use My

Shyp → Anyone

Actifio → Action

Alluxio → Alicia

who the hell is Alicia, Mark?!

Arimo → Primo

Zenefits → Benefits

Tanium → Tandem

Soylent → Silent

absolutely no spoilers

Skout → Shout

Ringly → Tingly

I think it’s on too tight

Nicira → Nicer

Maxta → Manta

Capriza → Capris

mobile enterprise solutions for you and your weird short pants

Autocorrect is renowned for causing awkward situations. But in this case it’s doing the Lord’s work, reaching through the touchscreen to slap some sense into misspelled, vowel-deficient, wordsmashy, Web 2.0 names. There’s a host of reasons these names are bad. They’re hard to remember (was it Aluxio? Alexio? Alonso?). They’re awkward to introduce (Hi, I’m with Vungle. It’s spelled like…Jungle, with a V. No, we just do ads.) And, with few exceptions, they don’t tell a story about what you do. Though they trade on the novelty of a made-up word, it ends up coming back to bite them. Autocorrect, built to combat misspelled words, makes this abundantly clear.

Tired of playing Wheel of Fortune with your name? Give us a call.