Don’t name your company a letter of the alphabet.

It’s an appealing idea, naming your company a letter. While there are over a million words in English, depending on what counts as a word*, there are only 26 letters. So if you can equate your company with one of these elemental building blocks, it stands to reason that you’ve just acquired a pretty big piece of mental real estate. 

Problem is, this piece of real estate is filled with quicksand, poison ivy, and venomous snakes. Did you not read the disclosures? 

Ok, so what are the actual issues with naming your company a letter?

There isn’t a lot to hold onto.

Letters aren’t very memorable. They’re essentially too short to leave much of an impression. You’re almost left hanging there waiting for the rest of the name. Good names create strong mental impressions and invite questions and conversations. The only question you’re going to get if your company name is a letter is “You mean, just the letter D?” 

Many letters are already words, which creates confusion.

Let’s go down the line, here:

• A: 5th most popular word in English**
• B: Be (as a lemma including all forms) is the 2nd most popular word in English. Also Bee
• C: See is the 69th most popular word in English. “Si” and “Sí” in Spanish are the 34th and 70th most popular words respectively
• G: Gee
• I: Eye, Aye, and I, the 6th most popular word in English
• J: Jay 
• L: “El” is the most popular word in Spanish, also used in English to connote the L-shape
• P: Pea, Pee 
• Q: Que, Queue
• R: Are is the 13th most popular word in English. Also Our 
• T: Tee, Tea 
• U: You is the 10th most popular word in English. Also Ewe
• X: Ex
• Y: Why

Not only are over half of English (Ok, Latin) letters actually words, many are quite popular words. So when people hear them as company names it becomes difficult to parse in a way that isn’t typically an issue with names. 

“Are you on R?” 

“It’s in I.”

“I just tried T.”

The elephant in the room 👀

X is the perfect example of how hard it is to name your company a letter. Today, years after the switch from Twitter, people are still calling them Twitter, or “X, formerly Twitter.” This is a lesson that could have been learned from X (formerly Google X), who had the exact same issue. They’re still called Google X regularly, almost 10 years after switching. 

There are also functional issues here. Some forms that ask for “company” won’t accept one character answers. In forums like LinkedIn, when you search for X, neither company is a first page result as of posting. Search in general is a big issue, especially in situations where you can’t pay for rank. Adding a single letter to a search string isn’t very helpful. 

One thing is for certain here — letter names work much better visually than verbally. This is because letters are very old symbols.*** In that sense they’re very iconic. There are myriad companies with logos that are letters or based on letters. For example, Special K, McDonalds, Honda, Acura, K-Mart, and Beats. University athletic departments are good at brand building with letters, too.

To be clear, I have no desire to chastise companies that try to name themselves letters. The biggest crime in company naming is being boring, and this is definitely not boring. It’s bold and risky, which is great fun as a spectator. But at this point, the issues are obvious. If it’s tough sledding for Google and Twitter, with massive resources, that should be a warning to everyone else. Now that I think about it, there’s actually something quite comforting about this being one thing money can’t really buy.

*This is including encyclopedic entries and various forms of the same word (drive, drove, driven, etc.) according to Merriam Webster

**Thank you to English-Corpora for the popularity rankings.

*** Proto-Sinaitic, the first non-pictoral, sound-based alphabet is about 3,800 years old.