How to check a company name before you commit to it

A name usually becomes permanent by accident. Somebody registers the domain to stop the argument, the designer starts on a logo, the deck goes out, and three weeks later nobody can remember agreeing to it. The checks below take an afternoon if they are done in one sitting, and they are much cheaper before the logo than after.

They are in order deliberately. Each one can end the process, and the early ones are free.

1. Say it, spell it, and print it small

Three tests, none of which needs a browser. Say the name down a phone to somebody who has never seen it written and ask them to type it. Write it at the smallest size you will ever use — a favicon, an invoice footer, a lanyard — and look at it from across the room. Then put it on the least glamorous thing the company will ever produce: a delivery label, a receipt, a parking permit.

Clever names get thin on a receipt. A deliberate misspelling that reads as a decision on a website reads as a typo on an invoice, and a pun stops working at eight point. Plain names often go the other way and start to look like a company that has been trading for years.

If a name survives all three, the rest of this list is worth your time. If it does not, stop here; nothing below will rescue it.

2. Search for it as a business, not as a domain

Domain availability is the check everyone runs first and it answers the narrowest question. Before that, find out whether the name is already a company.

• Your national company register. In the UK that is Companies House; most countries have a free equivalent, and a registered company with your name in your sector is a much bigger problem than a taken domain.
• The app stores, if you will ever ship an app. Store listings are searchable, global, and a source of confusion that no trademark search will surface.
• Trade press and industry directories for your sector. A competitor that never registered a trademark and never registered a company can still have fifteen years of customers using the name.
• Plain search, in quotation marks, plus your category word. Then again with the name spelled the obvious wrong way, which is how your customers will search for it.

You are looking for one thing: a business people could confuse with yours. Somebody using the same word in an unrelated field on another continent is usually not a problem. Somebody using it two categories away from you might become one.

3. Trademarks: what you can check, and what you cannot

This is the check where the difference between doing it yourself and getting advice actually matters, so it is worth being precise about which is which.

What you can do yourself, free, in about twenty minutes: search the public registers. The UK IPO, the EUIPO and the USPTO all publish searchable databases of registered and pending marks. Search your name, then search the obvious near-misses, and pay attention to the class numbers — trademarks are registered for particular kinds of goods and services, and the same word can be legitimately registered by different owners in different classes.

What that search cannot tell you is the thing you actually need to know. Registers show identical and near-identical marks; the legal question is whether an average customer would be confused, which is a judgement about similarity of the marks and similarity of the goods together. They also do not show unregistered rights, which in the UK and the US can be substantial — a business that has traded under a name for years may be able to stop you using it without ever having registered anything.

So a clear search is not a clearance. It is a filter that removes the obvious collisions cheaply. If the name survives it and you are about to spend real money — a rebrand, a product launch, a market you cannot easily withdraw from — that is the point to pay a trademark attorney for a proper search and an opinion. It costs less than a logo and very much less than changing the name in year three.

Nothing here is legal advice, and a solicitor or attorney in your jurisdiction is the person who can give you any.

4. What the name means somewhere else

If you will ever sell outside your own language, ask somebody who speaks the others. Not a translation tool — a person, ideally two, ideally not colleagues who want the project to go well.

The failures are rarely the famous ones about cars and mistranslations. They are quieter: a name that sounds childish in one market and clinical in another, a syllable that is a brand of something unrelated, a word that is fine in writing and vulgar when said quickly. Ten minutes of asking is the whole check.

5. The addresses

Now the domain. Open the .com in a browser before anything else, because "registered" and "unavailable" are not the same thing, and what is on the page tells you which one you are dealing with.

The long version of this is a piece of its own in the Journal, on what to do when your startup's .com is taken. The short version is that an active business in your field is a real problem, a for-sale page is a price question, and a parked page is a negotiation with somebody you have to find first.

Handles come after the domain, not before. A social handle can be modified with a suffix and nobody minds; an email address people have to be told twice is a cost you pay for the life of the company. Check the handles, take the best available versions, and do not let a taken handle veto a name that passed everything above it.

6. Write down why you chose it

One paragraph, before the excitement fades: what the name is supposed to do, what you know is wrong with it, and what you decided to live with. Every name has something wrong with it. Writing it down now means that in eighteen months, when somebody new joins and asks why the company is not called something clearer, there is an answer that is not a shrug.

It also tells you something immediately. If the paragraph is hard to write, the name is probably not finished.

The order, on one line

1. Say it, spell it, print it small.
2. Search it as a business: company register, app stores, trade press, plain search.
3. Search the trademark registers yourself; get an attorney before you spend real money.
4. Ask somebody who speaks the other languages you will sell in.
5. Open the .com in a browser, then take the handles.
6. Write down why you chose it, and what is wrong with it.

Most names die at step one or step two, which is the point of putting the free checks first.

Names that have already been through some of this

Everything on Webba is a .com that is for sale, which settles step five before you start. The rest of the list is still yours to run — a name being available does not make it clear of anyone else's rights, and we would rather say that plainly than imply otherwise.