William Shakespeare famously dismissed the importance of names. But a more modern wordsmith has built a three-decades-long career on just that—names.
Anthony Shore, 56, is a professional namer who has christened more than 250 companies and products—and one dog. The names whose creation he’s directed include Accenture, Adobe Lightroom, Yum! Brands, Dreyer’s Slow Churned ice cream, Tonal home gym, Starry internet services, Virgin Voyages, and FedEx Custom Critical.
Shore’s names have even made their way to outer space—a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip powered a NASA helicopter that landed on Mars—and the wrists of presidents: The Fitbit Ionic is former President Obama’s watch of choice.
Shore is trained as a linguist, has worked as a copywriter and typesetter, and led naming projects at branding firms Lexicon Branding and Landor Associates. Since 2009, Shore has run his own naming and branding agency, Operative Words.
“It’s the best job in the world,” Shore recently told Fortune. “I sit around all day and just think of ideas and words.”
Public naming
Perhaps the most high-profile naming project Shore directed was the renaming of Andersen Consulting to Accenture—“an accent on the future.”
In August 2000, the International Chamber of Commerce ordered Andersen Consulting to change its name after it spun off from the accounting firm Arthur Andersen LLP. Shore, then the director of writing and naming at Landor Associates, was brought in to lead the project.
The name “Accenture” was initially submitted by an employee at the firm—and was among the thousands of original and submitted names Shore pored over. When it came time for the firm’s senior partners to vote for the final name, it was two-to-one in favor of Accenture over the next 50 names, Shore said.
“It was the only name on the list which began with AC, and the Andersen Consulting logo was an A with a superscript C,” Shore said. “So there was a little bit of comfort, I think, that came with this name.”
Accenture reportedly spent $100 million on the rebranding—and it turned out to be money well spent when Arthur Andersen, the tax firm, became embroiled in the Enron scandal in 2001.
Shore declined to share how much he charges for his naming services, but according to StartupNation, hiring professional namers can cost anywhere between $10,000 and $100,000 depending on the scale of the project and company.
Kill your darlings
Shore’s naming projects typically take about seven weeks from start to finish. He first sits down with the client to discuss their vision and tastes—then develops a list of “name objectives.”
With the objectives as a guiding light, Shore and his team come up with a list of over 1,000 names—aided by linguistic software that maps the relationship between words.
Shore then narrows it down to a shortlist of 100 to 150 names, and sends them over to his trademark partner to screen the names’ trademark availability. There are typically at least 50 low-risk names left on the list by the time the screening is complete.
Shore presents these names to the client and gets feedback within a few days. Over the course of the next three weeks, Shore creates another, more focused batch of about 100 names to show the client.
After some deliberation, the client selects a short list of three to five names, then completes further screenings with their legal team. The client ultimately chooses one final name, and files an intent-to-use application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
“We develop over 1,000 names, and we slaughter every one of those darlings except for one,” Shore said.
He will sometimes keep the fallen names in his back pocket—but few of them live to see another day.
“I’m in naming for the long haul, and I can’t really spend time or effort grieving over the names that have fallen by the wayside,” he said.
‘I can’t turn it off’
What makes a great name? Shore points to three key characteristics—that it’s inspirational, differentiable, and, of course, legally available.
“A name is only as good as it is available,” he said.
Though Shore loves his job, he often finds himself unable to turn off the naming reflex in his everyday life.
“I have feelings about names when I see them—whether I want those feelings or not,” he said. “I can’t turn it off.”
One of the names Shore has strong feelings about is Kyndryl—a spinoff of IBM’s infrastructure services created in 2021. The name is a portmanteau of “kinship” and “tendril,” according to a press release from IBM.
“It’s meaningless; it’s unintuitive to say and spell,” Shore said. “It’s a name I just can’t stand.”
If bad names were a crime, Elon Musk’s X would be at the top of Shore’s guilty list.
“X is a branding crime,” Shore said. “To have taken the Twitter brand and all of its equity and its whole branded ecosystem—and to debrand it with this off-the-shelf idea that’s utterly undifferentiated, is a crime.”
But working in Musk’s defense is “The Boring Company,” the name of his tunneling startup.
“I think that’s a super cool name,” Shore said. “10 out of 10, no notes.”
Shore has over 250 brand names under his belt, but he’s never been asked to name a child. He did have the opportunity to name a friend’s chocolate labrador once—a rare occasion where he could run wild, free from the constraints of trademark availability and client feedback.
Shore named the labrador after a brand of chocolate syrup he remembers fondly from his childhood: Bosco.
