Analysts at Clutch, a business research firm in Washington, recently did a study of 700 company names. Half were founded before 2012 and now on the Inc. 500. The other half were start-up companies from the CrunchBase database that were founded after 2012 and had received a minimum of $3 million in venture funding in 2015.
The research paper categorized company names four ways: descriptive, experiential, evocative and invented.
Among start-ups, analysts discovered "there is a clear movement toward creating more invented types of names and toward resourceful combinations of words for new company names."
More than 40 percent of the start-ups had an invented name, compared with 17 percent of the Inc. 500 companies. More than 50 percent of the more mature companies chose a descriptive company name, compared with just 16 percent of the start-up companies.
The study concluded that there were some practical reasons for many naming trends including trademark and domain name availability. While more top-level domains become available, 88 percent of the start-ups had a dot-com domain extension.
