A scene I see most weeks. A founder opens a laptop in a Tanjong Pagar co-working space, types “give me 50 brand names for a sustainable laundry app” into a chatbot, and gets fifty in four seconds. By lunch there are five hundred, and the founder is further from a name than at breakfast.
Generating names has become almost free. Choosing one has not.
Creating a brand name is the process of defining what a name must do, generating a wide pool of candidates, screening them for linguistic, cultural, trademark and domain problems, testing the survivors with real people, and legally securing the winner before anyone else can.
AI has transformed the generating and helps with the screening. The rest still depends on judgement, a few unglamorous databases and a professional who signs their name to an opinion.
What has changed since we last wrote about naming?
Before chatbots, we published our seven-step guide to finding a startup name. Its instincts hold up: long list, trademark check, .com check, ten people saying the name aloud. The plumbing has moved.
That guide built long lists from thesauruses and spreadsheet formulas. Today a language model does it in seconds, and fails in new ways.
The WIPO Global Brand Database has a new address and an image similarity search for logos. IPOS fees have changed. WHOIS has largely given way to RDAP. Same craft, new toolkit.
Step 1: Why should the brief come before the brainstorm?
Because a chatbot with no brief produces the average of the internet, which is already taken.
Write one page. What do you do, in a sentence? What might you do in five years? Who buys, and which languages do they speak at home?
Then the harder questions. What do your nearest competitors call themselves? Which feeling should the name carry? Finally, set hard constraints: maximum syllables, markets it must survive, and whether you need the exact .com.
The five-year question matters most, because names that describe today’s business tend to fence in tomorrow’s. Garena, founded in Singapore in 2009 as a games company, renamed its parent Sea in 2017 once the group had grown well beyond games, and kept Garena for the games business. In February 2025 Zomato announced that its holding company would become Eternal, so that Zomato, Blinkit, Hyperpure and District could sit side by side under one neutral umbrella. Your brief should ask whether you will outgrow yours.
An official trailer for the Free Fire Pro League 2021 from Garena’s Free Fire India channel; Garena kept its name for the games business after its parent became Sea in 2017.
Step 2: Choose territories, not names
Before anyone generates a single candidate, agree on three to five creative territories. A territory is a direction, not a word: “natural phenomena”, “invented Latin-sounding words”, “everyday Malay objects”, “compounds that suggest motion”.
Territories stop the meeting where everyone defends a favourite, and they give your AI prompts structure. Agree on sound, too. The vowels and consonants in a name suggest size, speed and softness before anyone knows what it means, so decide whether you want sharp and quick or round and solid.
Step 3: How do you use AI to generate brand names?
Use it for volume inside tight constraints. Never ask for “a good name”. Ask for dozens of candidates in one territory, with rules, then ask it to break its own patterns.
Three prompts that work better than “give me names”:
1. Generate inside a territory
Act as a naming strategist. Brief: [paste one-page brief].
Territory: invented words built from Latin and Malay roots.
Generate 60 names, 2-3 syllables, under 9 letters.
No "-ify", "-ly", "-io" or "-hub" endings.
Group by feeling. No explanations.
2. Break the pattern
From your last list, remove any name that resembles a
well-known tech company. Then generate 40 names that
deliberately avoid the sound patterns you used most.
3. Screen the shortlist
For each of these 15 names, give:
- likely pronunciation by an English speaker in Singapore
- three ways it could be misspelt
- any obvious association in English, Malay, Mandarin,
Tamil, Indonesian or Vietnamese
Flag anything you are unsure of.
Run each territory in a fresh conversation so batches do not contaminate each other. Mix tools: a general assistant for constraints and iteration, and dedicated generators such as Namelix or Shopify’s free business name generator, which suggest short coinages and point you to domain availability as you go.
Read the list aloud with a colleague. Your ear will kill half of it in ten minutes, which is what ears are for.
Step 4: How do you screen a name across languages and cultures?
Here AI is a useful first filter, particularly in Southeast Asia, where a Singapore brand must work in English, Malay, Mandarin and Tamil before it leaves the island, then in Indonesian and Vietnamese if it travels.
Ask a model what each candidate sounds like, not only what it means, in each language. It will catch obvious traps: a suffix like “-ku”, which reads as “my” in Malay and Indonesian; a syllable that sounds like 死, death, in Mandarin and several dialects; a word that turns rude when Vietnamese speakers add the tones a Latin spelling leaves out.
What it will not reliably catch is slang, dialect, memes, or how a name lands with a teenager in Medan. Treat its output as questions for native speakers, not answers.
Transliteration needs particular care, because Chinese characters are effectively a second brand name. Michael Jordan sued Qiaodan Sports in 2012, and in December 2016 China’s Supreme People’s Court ruled that the company’s use of the Chinese characters for “Qiaodan”, the name by which Jordan is widely known in China, infringed his right to his name. The romanised spelling it allowed. Same sound, different script, different outcome.
What can’t AI do when you create a brand name?
Four things, and each one has cost somebody money.
It repeats itself. Models are trained on existing names, so they gravitate to the same endings, the same dropped vowels, the same blends. A name that sounds like a plausible AI suggestion sounds, by definition, like everyone else’s.
It can say a domain or name is “available” when it is not. A chatbot without live search predicts what an answer looks like; it has no idea who registered what last Tuesday. Treat its availability claims as fiction until you have checked.
It cannot clear a trademark. Clearance means judging similarity, goods and services and risk across jurisdictions. Ask OpenAI. It bought Jony Ive’s hardware start-up, io, in May 2025, then ran into a trademark complaint from iyO, a hearing-device start-up. OpenAI lost an appeal over the name at the end of 2025, and in a February 2026 court filing said it had decided not to use “io” at all.
OpenAI’s own video introducing GPT-4o; the company later said it would not use the name “io” after a trademark complaint from iyO.
It is not a vault. An unfiled name is a trade secret with no protection. Check your tool’s data settings, use business accounts that do not train on your inputs, and keep finalists offline until you have filed.
Does a brand name still need the .com?
For most brands that sell beyond one neighbourhood, yes, if you can get it. It is still what people type when they guess an address.
It is also crowded. At the end of the second quarter of 2026 there were 166.6 million .com registrations, out of 401.6 million domains across all endings, so short, pronounceable ones are scarce. Tesla ran on teslamotors.com for years because Stu Grossman had held tesla.com since 1992. The company only secured it in February 2016, and dropped “Motors” from its corporate name a year later.
Check availability properly:
- Search at an accredited registrar for the exact name and its obvious misspellings. Check your shortlist in one sitting and register what you want immediately. Founders have long complained of searched names being registered by someone else within weeks; there is no prize for waiting.
- Run an RDAP lookup on any name that shows as taken. RDAP has been WHOIS’s official successor for most generic domains since January 2025, and ICANN’s free Lookup tool shows a domain’s registration record, including its registrar and key dates.
- Check the aftermarket. Many “taken” domains are parked and for sale, and some unregistered ones are priced as “premium”, sometimes with high renewals too.
- Buy your country domains. In Singapore, .sg and .com.sg require a local presence: an organisation registering needs a UEN, and the administrative contact needs a Singapore address and SingPass ID.
And the alternatives? Colombia’s .co is short and popular with start-ups, but customers often type .com by habit. The .io ending belongs to the British Indian Ocean Territory, which the UK agreed in May 2025 to hand to Mauritius, and if its country code is withdrawn, .io could be phased out over at least five years. Anguilla’s .ai passed 1.2 million registrations by mid-2026, but requires a minimum two-year registration and costs noticeably more than a .com.
ICANN’s 2026 round of new endings drew 1,615 applications, 333 of them for brand-owned extensions, but evaluation runs well into 2027. It changes nothing for you this year.
How do I check if a brand name is already trademarked?
Start with the WIPO Global Brand Database at branddb.wipo.int. It is free and searches several large collections in one place: international registrations under the Madrid System, trademarks from a growing list of participating national and regional offices, appellations of origin and geographical indications, protected state emblems and the World Health Organization’s non-proprietary drug names.
A quick routine:
- Search the exact name, then likely variants: plurals, misspellings, the name with and without spaces.
- Look for similar spellings and sounds, not only identical matches, because a mark that merely resembles yours can block you.
- Check which Nice classes each result covers against what you sell now and plan to sell, and which countries it is protected in.
- If you have a logo, try the image similarity search.
Know its limits. Not every national office contributes data, and unregistered rights, company names and brands used but never filed will not appear. A clean result means “nothing obvious yet”, not “safe to use”.
Be clear about what you are doing here. A database search is a first screen to weed out obvious conflicts. It is not legal clearance, and no free tool can give you that.
Registering in Singapore and beyond
Next, go to the national register in each market. In Singapore, search IPOS’s database, then file online through the IPOS Digital Hub. The application fee is S$280 per class if you choose all your goods and services from IPOS’s pre-approved classification list, and S$410 per class if you write your own descriptions. Our older guide quoted S$240.
For overseas protection, the Madrid System lets you file one international application, based on your Singapore filing, and designate other member countries. Singapore has been a member since 2000; the system now has 117 members covering 133 countries.
Trademarks are territorial. Apple bought the iPad name from Proview’s Taiwanese affiliate, which had registered it in several countries from 2000, but Proview’s Shenzhen company argued the mainland China rights were never part of the deal. In July 2012 the Guangdong High Court announced that Apple had paid US$60 million to settle.
Similarity is judged broadly, too. A Singapore café chain sold an espresso drink called Nutello, made with Nutella. In 2012 Singapore’s Court of Appeal upheld findings that the name infringed Ferrero’s well-known mark, diluted it and amounted to passing off.
Which is why every check in this section, WIPO and IPOS included, is a first screen. Before you print, file or announce, brief a trademark agent or IP lawyer for a full clearance search and a written opinion.
Step 5: Can you test a brand name with AI personas?
Yes, as a rehearsal. Ask a model to role-play twenty customer types and react to your shortlist, and it may surface objections you missed, like a name that sounds medical.
But synthetic respondents only echo their training data. They have never queued at a hawker centre. Use them to sharpen questions, not pick winners.
Then test with people, at least ten of them. Say each name once over the phone and ask the listener to spell it. Show it for three seconds, then ask for it back an hour later.
Put it beside three competitors and see whether it stands apart. Don’t ask whether they like it; the best names often feel slightly odd on day one.
Step 6: How do you secure a brand name once you choose it?
Do it in one sweep, within days. File the trademark in your home market, in every class you need.
Register the .com (or your agreed alternative), the country domains and the obvious misspellings. Claim the social handles. Incorporate or update your business name. Only then announce.
When Facebook announced its new name on 28 October 2021, the “Meta” mark had been registered in the United States years earlier by a Canadian big-data company that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative had acquired in 2017. The rights were transferred to the newly renamed Meta Platforms. Most of us have no friendly philanthropy holding our dream name, so we file first.
And if the name turns out to be wrong? Rename early. Shein began life as SheInside and changed its name in 2015 to something simpler to remember and easier to find online.
Questions from the naming table
How long does it take to create a brand name?
A focused project usually needs a few weeks to brief, generate and screen, plus time for professional clearance. Trademark registration itself typically takes months after filing, so start well before your launch date is fixed.
Can AI tell me if a brand name is available?
No. Some generators check domain availability live, but no chatbot can confirm trademark clearance, and general models can present guesses as facts. Verify domains at a registrar and trademarks on official registers, then with a professional.
How much does it cost to file a trademark in Singapore?
An online IPOS application costs S$280 per class when goods and services come from the pre-approved list, or S$410 per class otherwise. Agent and search fees are extra.
When your five hundred names have dwindled to one you’re nervous about, Firefish’s brand naming team is happy to pull up a chair.
