The grandmother test: the brand-naming rule I now apply everywhere, and why “no DNS record” is not an available domain

One of the candidate names on my shortlist last week returned nothing in DNS. No A record, no nameservers, no mail. On most availability checkers that reads as free. It was registered, and had been for years, by somebody who had simply never pointed it anywhere.

I found that out because I had stopped trusting DNS for this and started asking the registry directly. That is the smaller of the two lessons from a naming round for a new venture I am building in medical aesthetics. The bigger one is a test I now apply to every brand name I will ever choose.

The grandmother test

The rule is one sentence: somebody who barely speaks the language has to pronounce the name correctly on first reading, and pronounce it the same way in German, French, Dutch and English.

That sounds soft until you try to operationalise it. Here is what it reduces to in practice.

Two or three open syllables, each a consonant followed by a vowel. Only the vowels a, e, i and o — u is out, because a German reader and a French or Dutch reader do not agree on it. Only the consonants l, m, n, r, s, t, d, b and k. No c, g, v, w, j or z, no ch or th, no ae or eu, and no silent final e.

The list looks arbitrary written down. It is not. Every exclusion is a letter or cluster where two of my four target markets diverge on the sound. Once you apply it, you are left with names that cannot be read two ways, which is the whole point.

It also killed the name I had been quietly attached to. Four syllables, a soft c, a silent e — lovely on paper, and three different words depending on who said it out loud. Out.

Why a pronounceable name is a commercial argument, not an aesthetic one

This is not taste. People trust names they can say. The name-pronunciation effect, from work by Laham, Koval and Alter published in 2012, found that easier-to-pronounce surnames were judged more positively and were advantaged in workplace settings — the same person, the same credentials, a name that takes less effort to process.

For a healthcare-adjacent brand the stakes rise. Someone has to say it to a receptionist, to a friend, to a voice assistant. A name that is mispronounced is a name that is mistyped, and a mistyped brand is a brand that does not get found in search at all.

David McRaney, in You Are Not So Smart, shows the mechanism with a string of letters: RKFBIIRSCBSUSSR is almost impossible to repeat, and RK FBI IRS CBS USSR is easy. “You just took fifteen bits and reduced them to five.” A name of three open syllables is three bits. A name with a consonant cluster and a silent letter is fifteen.

“No DNS record” is not “available”

Now the mechanical half, because this is where a naming round quietly wastes a week.

A DNS lookup tells you whether a domain is in use. It says nothing about whether it is owned. A parked, warehoused or forgotten domain answers with nothing at all, and most quick-check tools report that as a green light. I have been caught by it before, and I have written about what a dormant domain actually is from the other side of the transaction.

The authoritative answer comes from the registry, over RDAP — the Registration Data Access Protocol, the structured, JSON successor to WHOIS. You find the right server for a given top-level domain from IANA’s bootstrap registry, the mechanism standardised in RFC 9224. Ask it for the domain and you get either a registration record or a clean “not found”. That is the answer you can act on.

So the check became two-stage and scriptable: DNS first because it is cheap, then RDAP against the real registry for every survivor, in every target market, with a couple of seconds between calls so you do not get rate-limited. Some registries do not expose RDAP publicly or block automated queries, and you need to know which, because a failed lookup is not a free domain either.

The last gate is trademark, not DNS. One shortlisted name sat a single letter away from an established medical-device brand, which is exactly the kind of collision that surfaces in a trademark database and never in a domain checker. It was dropped before anyone fell in love with it.

The output of a good naming round is a rule, not a name

What I actually came away with was not the name. It was four lines of constraints, a two-stage availability check I can run as a batch, and the knowledge that both of those are now reusable for the next brand, the next market and the next client.

In Blue Ocean Shift, Renée Mauborgne notes that organisations are sometimes “so close to their industry that they fail to see what hassles still exist”. Everyone inside a company can pronounce the company’s own name. That is precisely why nobody checks.

Which is the part I would push on if you are naming something this quarter. The shortlist is the fun bit and the cheap bit. Write the constraint first, hand it to somebody who does not speak your language, and let them read the list aloud. If they hesitate, the name is already costing you.

A brand has to survive being said badly. Choose one that cannot be.

Sources & further reading

External
Freakonomics on the name-pronunciation effect — Laham, Koval & Alter (2012) on easy-to-pronounce names being judged more favourably.
RFC 9082 — the RDAP query format for domain registration data.
RFC 9224 — how to find the authoritative RDAP service for a given top-level domain.
IANA RDAP bootstrap registry — the machine-readable list of registry RDAP endpoints.
WIPO Global Brand Database — the collision check a domain lookup will never do for you.

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