How to Check a Name Before You Commit

The expensive naming mistake is almost never a bad name. It is a good name that someone else already owns, discovered after the signage, the packaging, and the app store listing.

The checks below take about two hours per name. Run them on three or four finalists, not just your favorite, because at least one finalist will fail and you want the fallback already cleared.

Start with the plain search

Before any database, type the name into Google in quotation marks. Then without quotes. Then add your industry word.

You are looking for four things:

• An existing company in your sector. Immediate disqualification.
• An existing company in a different sector. Possibly fine legally, painful practically, because you will fight for your own name in search results forever.
• A famous person, a medical condition, or a news event. A name that shares a page with a disease outbreak is a name you will regret.
• A meaning you did not intend. Slang moves faster than dictionaries.

Then search the app stores, GitHub, YouTube and TikTok if your product or audience lives there. Each is its own namespace with its own squatters.

Trademark databases

A trademark is registered per class of goods and services, in each jurisdiction where you want protection. There are 45 classes in the international system: 1 through 34 for goods, 35 through 45 for services. A clothing company and a software company can both own the same word, in different classes, and neither can stop the other.

So the first thing to decide is which classes you actually sell in. Then search.

Office	What it covers	Notes
USPTO trademark search	US federal registrations and pending applications	This is the system that replaced the old TESS interface. Free, public, searchable by mark and by class
EUIPO eSearch	EU trade marks	Also runs TMview, which searches across dozens of national offices at once
WIPO Global Brand Database	International registrations plus many national collections	The broadest single free search available
UK IPO trade mark search	UK registrations	Separate from the EU system since Brexit
Your national office	Everywhere else	Most countries run a free public search

How to search properly. Do not only search the exact string. Examiners and courts care about likelihood of confusion, which covers similar spellings, similar sounds, and similar meanings. So also search obvious respellings (c for k, s for z, ph for f, doubled letters), the name without its ending as a wildcard to catch Mirah, Mira and Mirasoft, and each source word alone if your blend is transparent enough that both are readable.

A blended name is usually easier to clear than a descriptive one, and the reason is structural. Trademark law ranks names from generic, which is never registrable, through descriptive, suggestive, arbitrary, to fanciful. The last three are inherently distinctive and can be registered right away. A fusion of two words normally lands in suggestive territory and sometimes reads as a fully coined string, the strongest position there is, where Exxon and Kodak sit. That is the quiet advantage of generating names with the brand name generator rather than describing what you do.

What a free search cannot do. It cannot see unregistered common-law rights, which exist in the US and elsewhere simply through use, and it cannot judge likelihood of confusion, which is a legal standard. Use it to eliminate names cheaply, then pay an attorney for an hour on the survivor.

Domains

Check the exact-match domain in the extensions you would actually use. If .com is gone, look at who holds it. A parked page for sale is a negotiation. An operating company in your sector is a stop sign.

Extension reality. Among 2025 Y Combinator companies, 46 percent used .com and 31 percent used .ai. Those two account for more than three quarters of the field. Then .dev at 3.8 percent, .io at 3.5 percent, .co at 2.1 percent. The honest argument for .com is not SEO, it is that a reported 70 percent of people distrust extensions they do not recognize, and you will type your domain into a lot of forms.

What to avoid: hyphens, because they get forgotten and cannot be dictated. Numbers, because “four” and “4” are the same when spoken. Unconventional misspellings, unless the substitution is consistent enough for a listener to reconstruct it.

Any registrar (Namecheap, Porkbun, Cloudflare, GoDaddy, Google Domains successors) will tell you whether a domain is free, and their prices differ mainly on renewals rather than first year, so read the renewal price before you buy. If you want to see which variants of your name are even worth checking, the domain name generator produces the candidate list first. A note on links: some of our availability buttons are affiliate links, which means we may earn a commission if you register a domain through them, at no extra cost to you.

Social handles

Check the handle, not just the name, on every platform you will actually use. Then check it on the two you think you will never use, because the one you skip is the one that matters in three years.

Multi-platform checkers of the Namechk or KnowEm type are a fast first pass, not an authoritative one. They miss private accounts, report stale data, and sometimes flag a handle as taken when the account is deactivated and reclaimable. Confirm manually by visiting the profile URL on the platforms you care about: usually Instagram, X, TikTok, LinkedIn and YouTube.

If the handle is taken everywhere, resist padding with an underscore or a number. A padded handle reads as a second choice and is hard to dictate over a phone. Generating a fresh variant with the username generator usually beats decorating a taken one.

Business registries

Registering a trademark and registering a company are different things, and neither one gives you the other.

• United States: your Secretary of State’s business entity database, for the state you will incorporate in. Each state is separate.
• United Kingdom: the Companies House name availability checker.
• India: the MCA company name search, plus a separate search at IP India.
• Canada: NUANS, plus the provincial registry. Australia: the ASIC business name check.
• Everywhere else: the national companies register, almost always free to search.

A company name being available in your state does not mean you can use it. Someone with a federal trademark can stop you even if your state cheerfully registers the entity.

Meaning in other languages

This check costs ten minutes and prevents the most public kind of failure.

Name	Market	Problem	Outcome
Mitsubishi Pajero	Spain and Latin America	pajero is vulgar Spanish slang	Renamed Montero for those markets
Ford Pinto	Brazil	pinto is Brazilian Portuguese slang for small male genitals	Renamed Corcel
Pee Cola	English-speaking markets	Ordinary name in Ghana, unfortunate in English	Sold on regardless
Barf detergent	English-speaking markets	barf means snow in Persian	Sold on regardless

And one that everybody repeats and nobody checks: the Chevrolet Nova did not fail in Latin America. The story that Spanish speakers heard “no va,” meaning “it doesn’t go,” has been debunked by Snopes, NPR, and others. The Nova sold well in Mexico and exceeded projections in Venezuela. Spanish speakers do not parse one word as two any more than English speakers hear “notable” as “no table.”

The real failures were single words with existing slang meanings, not clever misreadings. So the check is simple: get one native speaker per target market to look at the shortlist and react. Not a translation. A reaction.

Read the name back for accidents

Automated generators produce accidental words, and so do human brainstorms. Two failure modes, both worth a deliberate pass:

Hidden words inside the name. Cloud plus kitchen produces a blend containing an obscene substring. Breakfast plus lunch, reversed, produces leakfast, which now advertises a leak. Read every candidate letter by letter, and read it as a lowercase URL with no spaces, because expertsexchange.com is the canonical warning.

Over-correcting. The opposite error is real too. In April 1996 AOL’s profanity filter blocked residents of Scunthorpe, England from creating accounts because the town’s name contains an obscene substring; SafeSearch repeated the mistake in the early 2000s, and Facebook blocked promotion of posts naming the town in 2016. Shiitake mushrooms are the other classic casualty. A name is not disqualified because a naive substring match finds something. It is disqualified because a human reading it sees something.

The checklist

#	Check	Where	Clear means
1	Plain search	Google, quoted and unquoted	No competitor, no famous collision on page one
2	App and platform search	App Store, Play, GitHub, YouTube	No active product with the name
3	Trademark, home market	USPTO, UK IPO, or national office	No live mark in your classes
4	Trademark, other markets	EUIPO, TMview, WIPO Global Brand Database	Same, per market
5	Domain	Any registrar	Exact match free in .com or your chosen extension
6	Social handles	Each platform, manually	Same handle available on the ones you will use
7	Business registry	State, Companies House, MCA, ASIC	Entity name available in your jurisdiction
8	Language check	One native speaker per target market	No unfortunate meaning or slang
9	Accidental words	Read it as a lowercase URL	Nothing hidden inside
10	Say and spell test	Five people who have not seen it	Four of five say it the same way, three of five spell it right
11	Legal review	A trademark attorney	Opinion on the one name you intend to use

Nothing here is legal advice, and no free search is clearance. The point of running all eleven is to arrive at the attorney with one name instead of six, which is the difference between an hour of their time and a week of it.

It is also much easier to be ruthless in this checklist when you know there are forty more candidates behind the one you just killed, which is the real argument for generating in bulk with the business name generator before you start checking anything.