Why "Meaningless" Brand Names Built Billion-Dollar Companies

Kodak means nothing. Xerox means nothing. Google was a spelling mistake. Yet these are three of the most valuable brand names ever created. Here's what most naming articles leave out — and why trying this same trick today is far riskier than it was in 1888.

The Coined-Word Hall of Fame

George Eastman didn't want "Kodak" to mean anything. He liked the letter "k," calling it strong and incisive, and tested combinations of letters starting and ending with it until Kodak fit his three criteria: short, impossible to mispronounce, and unlike anything else already in use. That blankness was the whole point — a name with no baggage, ready to absorb whatever meaning the camera business poured into it.

Xerox followed the same logic decades later. Haloid hired a Greek scholar to coin the word "xerography," meaning "dry writing," then shortened it to Xerox — and the name became so dominant that "to xerox" entered the dictionary as its own verb for photocopying.

Verizon combines "veritas" (truth) and "horizon" — meaningless as a whole word, but built from pieces that quietly suggest reliability. Häagen-Dazs is a fully invented, pseudo-Scandinavian phrase, created purely because it sounded foreign and trustworthy, with no real meaning in Danish at all.

None of these names needed to mean anything. They needed to sound like something — strong, memorable, easy to own.

Why Blank Names Work

Naming experts call these "empty vessel" names: abstract, invented words with no built-in meaning that a brand can fill through advertising and repetition over time. Three things made the classic ones stick:

This Pattern Didn't Die With Audi

Most naming articles stop at the 1900s, as if this trick disappeared. It didn't — and it isn't always deliberate genius. Sometimes it's a coincidence hiding in plain sight.

August Horch couldn't reuse his own surname for his second car company after a falling-out with his first one, so a business partner's son, who was studying Latin, suggested translating "Horch" — German for "listen!" — into its Latin equivalent: "Audi." To most people, it reads as a clean, invented luxury name. It's actually a command, hiding in a dead language.

I ran into the same thing while going through my own domain portfolio. Baluj.com looked like a short, brandable string invented purely for its sound — the kind of name you assume is blank by design. It isn't. In Polish, "baluj" is the imperative form of the verb balować, "to party" — used in everyday phrases like "pracuj lekko, baluj ciężko" ("work hard, party harder"). What reads as abstract in English is an active command in Polish, and one that happens to point straight at nightlife, events, and hospitality branding.

Why This Is Riskier Today Than It Was for Audi

In 1909, there was no searchable multilingual database to check a name against. Today, that check takes twenty minutes, and skipping it costs far more than it used to:

The open linguistic space that made Kodak and Xerox possible barely exists anymore. But Audi and Baluj show the upside too: sometimes checking doesn't uncover a risk. It uncovers an asset nobody else has found yet.

Before you dismiss a name as a random string, check what it means somewhere else in the world. You might be holding a liability — or a name that's already telling its own story. Have you ever found hidden meaning in a domain you owned? Tell me in the comments.

— Imteaz Chowdhury Galib