Ideas for names

Maybe you need ideas for names.  Maybe you need to come up with a baby name.  Maybe you need a name for a team at work, or school, or a soccer team.  Maybe a club.  Whatever it is, you need some inspiration.

One place to start is by looking around.  For baby names, look at a book of baby names.  For that and names in general, you can also look on the internet.  Be sure to see what the name means.  Talk with people.  Ask them what their favorite name is, or favorite names.

If you still don't have a good name, maybe you can combine names.  Maybe you like a baby name, but have to adjust it, because of the gender.  Maybe you are voting on a good team name, and it's down to two.  You can take the first half of one and put the end of the other, or just add both names in one.

Another thing you can do is come up with an acronym.  You could come up with a long team name and shorten it with an acronym.  You could come up with an acronym of the people on your team.  In the computer world, they use acronyms a lot, and even include recursive acronyms, like GNU=Gnu's not Unix.

Another thing you can use is another language.  In fact, if you just come up with something clever, you may want to to be sure that it doesn't mean something bad in another language.  The "Nova" car, for example, didn't sell well in South America.  It's no wonder, though, when you know that "no va" in Spanish means "it doesn't go."  You may want to use a word from Spanish, or Latin, or Italian, or French--or even Esperanto, the language that no country speaks.  It's just a language that some scholars made up.  It's really a great language, with no irregularities, etc.  Unfortunately, no countries speak it, but I did see an Esperanto word used as the name of a computer programming module.

Be sure that if it is for a team name, that you get everyone's opinions.  Someone may be hiding their input.  Also, you want to make it something that is fairly representative of the whole group.  If the team or club is a mixture of both boys and girls, then you don't want it to be something specific to boys or girls, but something that applies to both.

What are some good names you like?  What are some ways you get inspired to find new names?