A great name, one consultant says, “takes reality and just alters it a little bit.” Illustration by Seymour Chwast

In the summer of 1998, a group of executives from a small technology startup called Research in Motion arrived at the California offices of Lexicon, a firm devoted to inventing names for products. The executives had brought with them the prototype for a new device, a two-way pager that could send and receive e-mail wirelessly. They could not agree on a name, but they had a few contenders: EasyMail, MegaMail, and ProMail.

“Everybody likes to name something ‘Pro,’ ” Lexicon’s founder and C.E.O., David Placek, told me dryly. Placek is a stocky man of fifty-eight whose unassuming presentation—blue blazer, shirt and tie, clipped blond hair—disguises an unpredictable imagination. He told the executives, “You guys are the underdog. You want to name it something that the big guys—A.T. & T., Southwestern Bell, California Bell—would never think of. You have to be distinctive, a little bold—or rebellious.”

To begin the naming process, Placek and a few members of his staff interviewed commuters riding the ferry from San Francisco to Sausalito, where Lexicon’s offices are situated, near the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. They wanted to know how, in those early days of the digital revolution, people felt about the prospect of being able to receive e-mail everywhere. “When you said ‘e-mail’ to someone, it wasn’t a joyous thing,” Placek said. “The way I explained it to Research in Motion was ‘Blood pressure goes up.’ ” Placek told the executives that the device needed a name that would soothe this stress response. MegaMail, with its connotations of an unstoppable avalanche of virtual messages, was definitely out.

Most projects at Lexicon start off with free-associated Mind Maps—large diagrams of words that spread out like dendrites from a central concept. A map of hundreds of words, generated at the pace of a brainstorming session, can take less than ten minutes to produce and can resemble a Cy Twombly scribble painting. The maps help to stake out linguistic territory, and to bring forth the deeper associations that a particular product evokes—“the words underneath the name,” as Placek puts it. For the Research in Motion device, he said, “we had teams working on ‘things that are natural,’ ‘things that are fresh,’ ‘things that are fun.’ At a certain point, we got into the area of ‘things that are enjoyable.’ ” On a Mind Map, someone wrote “strawberry.” Then someone wrote beside it, “Strawberry is too slow.” Placek pronounced the word—“Str-a-a-a-w-w-berry”—drawing it out. “This technology is instantaneous,” he said.

On the map, someone else wrote “blackberry.” “I’d love to be able to say I saw it on the wall and said, ‘Wham, this is it! I’m a genius!’ ” Placek told me. But the process by which a name is selected from hundreds of candidates can be arduous, and often comes down to a combination of instinct, abstract reasoning, and the client’s idiosyncratic demands. “Blackberry” went onto a list of about forty potential names that Placek took to Research in Motion’s offices, in Waterloo, Canada. In the next few weeks, he and the R.I.M. executives narrowed the list, and eventually talked themselves into the name Blackberry. Its strengths, they decided, were not limited to blood-pressure-lowering associations with fruit. The word “black” evoked the color of high-tech devices, and the gadget’s small, oval keys looked like the drupelets of a blackberry.

Lexicon employs two in-house linguists and consults with seventy-seven others around the world, specialists in languages as diverse as Urdu, Tagalog, and Hindi—a critical resource, Placek says. They screen names for embarrassing associations. (The industry abounds in tales of cross-linguistic gaffes, like Creap coffee creamer from Japan, Bum potato chips from Spain, and the Chevy Nova—in Spanish, the “no go.”) They also offer input on the unconscious resonance of particular sounds. In the mid-nineties, Lexicon funded a linguistic study whose results suggested that the sound of the letter “b” was one of the most “reliable” in any language—“whether you were in Poland or Paris or New York,” Placek said. He mentioned this to the Research in Motion executives, and they decided to capitalize both “b”s: BlackBerry.

In January, 1999, the BlackBerry was launched. Despite heavy competition from the Droid and the iPhone, it remains one of the best-selling smart phones, with seventy million subscribers worldwide. Lexicon’s most successful names—among them Pentium, for Intel; Swiffer, for Procter & Gamble; PowerBook, for Apple; Dasani, for Coca-Cola—have become immensely lucrative global brands, which collectively have brought in billions of dollars for their companies.

Of course, not all successful brand names are created by professionals. Larry Page and Sergey Brin came up with the name of their search engine by misspelling “googol,” the word for the number one followed by a hundred zeros. The name Coca-Cola was devised by an accountant working for the drink’s creator—he thought that the two “C”s would look good in advertisements. But such happy accidents are increasingly rare. Products are proliferating around the world, from automobiles to cleansers, drugs, and, especially, electronics. In 1980, there were fewer than ten thousand registered high-tech trademarks in the United States; now there are more than three hundred thousand. The ideal contemporary name works across languages, on search engines, and on Twitter and Facebook, all while displaying the ingenuity necessary to stand out—a difficult standard for business owners to meet without help.

Placek maintains that the best brand names, like poems, work by compressing into a single euphonious word an array of specific, resonant meanings and associations. But he prefers to emphasize the practical aspects of his work. “I’ve learned that if I use that with prospective clients—‘Hey, what we’re creating here is a small poem’—you can see people sort of get concerned,” he told me. “Like, ‘This isn’t really about art here. This is about getting things done.’ ”

Brand naming has existed for centuries. Italians made watermarks on paper in the twelve-hundreds. During the industrial revolution, companies sought to inspire consumer confidence with names borrowed from their owners’ families: Singer sewing machines, Fuller brushes, Hoover vacuums—all names that are still in use. Before the First World War, there was a wave of abstract names ending in “o” (like Brillo and Brasso), followed, in the nineteen-twenties, by one of “ex” names: Pyrex, Cutex, Windex. But, according to Eric Yorkston, a marketing professor at Texas Christian University, modern brand naming—with its sophisticated focus groups and its linguistic and psychological analysis—began in the years after the Second World War, when the explosion of similar products from competing companies made imaginative naming an increasing necessity.

In 1957, the Ford Motor Company made an enormous investment in a newly engineered and designed mid-priced car. When Henry Ford introduced the first affordable automobile, a half century earlier, the lack of competition allowed him to name it, prosaically, the Model T (coming, as it did, after the Model S). Now, with the rise of G.M. and Chrysler, Ford was forced to take a different approach. It hired an advertising agency and asked its employees to generate potential names. (The list—more than eighteen thousand names in all—included Citation, Corsair, Pacer, and Ranger, which were scrupulously tested with focus groups and man-on-the-street interviews before being rejected.) Ford even wrote to the poet Marianne Moore, asking her to think up a name that would “convey, through association or other conjuration, some visceral feeling of elegance, fleetness, advanced features and design.” Moore responded with a list of names that demonstrated a serene distance from the commercial marketplace: among them were Intelligent Bullet, Utopian Turtletop, Bullet Cloisoné, Pastelogram, Mongoose Civique, and Andante con Moto.