---
name: naming-lab
description: Generate, evaluate, shortlist, or refine commercial names against a naming brief, including category patterns and preliminary conflict or language research. Use directly for creative naming or an existing shortlist; domain ideas and availability belong to naming-domains.
---

# Naming Lab

Solve the requested creative naming task without automatically restarting the full workflow. Read [the project-file contract](../naming-studio/references/project-files.md), then the selected project's STATUS.md, brief, and relevant candidate or feedback files. If no brief exists, collect the minimum business, audience, experience, market/language, and constraints needed; use [naming-studio](../naming-studio/SKILL.md) for a fuller brief only when needed. Do not fabricate missing context.

## Research the naming space

Use supplied competitor examples or current sources when market research is in scope. Identify repeated words, sounds, metaphors, and suffixes so candidates differ for a reason. Cite actual examples. Label unresearched category judgments provisional; do not invent an audit. Keep research proportional to the request.

## Invent separately from evaluation

For new generation, use distinct creative passes:

1. The actual business and intended customer experience.
2. An imagined different company or competitor delivering the same benefit, with different organizational assumptions.
3. An unrelated category embodying that experience: movement, sport, music, nature, or another relevant world.

Explore indirect existing words, image-rich compounds, pronounceable coined words, and concrete activities or objects that make the experience imaginable. Preserve unusual ideas before judging. Do not pad with spelling variants or invent etymologies; label intended associations as associations.

Scale honestly: several dozen candidates across directions can support a normal first pass, while deep work can expand in batches. Honor requested counts. Save candidates actually generated with stable IDs; never claim thousands of ideas when they were not produced. Before pruning a promising unfamiliar direction, describe what the business could build around it.

For an existing shortlist, evaluate it before generating alternatives. For refinement, distinguish unfamiliarity from mispronunciation, harmful association, or business confusion. Neither popularity nor polarization proves quality. Preserve the user's taste and constraints, and record what feedback changed.

## Evaluate against the brief

- Distinctiveness from actual category patterns and close competitors.
- Useful customer image, expectation, or experience.
- Ease of saying, hearing, reading, remembering, and plausibly spelling it in target languages; show pronunciation and competing readings where relevant.
- Range across plausible future offerings without an unsupported promise.
- Credible language and imagery the team could execute.

Use reasoned judgments. Avoid numerical precision unless subjective scores would help and their meaning and decisive tradeoffs are explained. Optional sound-symbolism prompts are bounded by [attribution](../naming-studio/references/attribution.md); do not force particular letters.

For promising names, keep preliminary screening separate from taste: existing businesses/products including similar spellings and sounds; meanings, slang, pronunciation and cultural associations in relevant markets; trademark findings in relevant jurisdictions/classes if actually checked; and handle status if actually checked. Use current sources for factual findings and record source/date/scope in RESEARCH.md. Local language context can exceed dictionary translation. Use `not checked`, `preliminary search: no obvious conflict found`, or `potential conflict found`. Web search is not legal clearance; intuition is not worldwide linguistic validation. Domain findings belong to the domain skill.

## Deliver the creative result

Return the requested count, usually 5–8 shortlisted names: direction, intended association, fit, main weakness, pronunciation if useful, and separate verification statuses. Recommend a lead with alternatives that offer distinct tradeoffs.

For the strongest 2–3, show comparable homepage sentences, spoken introductions, labels, or hypothetical launch headlines. Keep claims factual or clearly hypothetical. Text is normally sufficient; visuals are optional only when useful.

Suggest unbiased feedback prompts: “What would you expect a company with this name to do or feel like?”, “What could we build around this name?”, or “Imagine a new competitor launched under this name—what would you expect?” Ask for reactions before providing the rationale. Label the competitor scenario hypothetical; never fabricate customer responses or present imagined reactions as research.

Save candidate states, actual research, applications, feedback changes, and the recommendation as relevant. Update STATUS.md. For creative-only requests, stop with checks explicitly pending. For a full naming request, continue with [naming-domains](../naming-domains/SKILL.md) for the shortlist before the final recommendation. A direct evaluation-only call may offer that follow-up without expanding the task.