The Rise and Fall of ‘Disemvoweling’

“At the end of the day… it all comes down to one simple, absolute truth: Tumbler.com looks fucking stupid.”

Image: Badly edited by author

Normally, Trend Mill is focused on current, mostly terrible trends. But I had a crazy week last week, and have no idea what is going on in the world right now. So, I thought it would be fun to look back at one of my favourite ever terrible trends — disemvowelment.

From creating new words like “Kodak,” forcing words together like “Facebook,” or intentionally misspelling phrases like “Krispy Kreme,” companies have a long history of picking phonetically fabricated — and occasionally nonsensical — brand names.

For the past two decades, one particularly popular business trend was for companies to drop vowels from their names; if you glanced at a list of tech firms circa the early 2000s, you might be forgiven for assuming the humble vowel was going extinct. Flickr, Grindr, and Tumblr all launched within a few years of each other, each one seemingly forgetting to bring the letter “e” along with them. A whole host of companies have followed suit — Scribd, Pixlr, Blendr, and Mndfl, to name but a few.

When Twitter launched in 2006, it did so under the name Twttr. A bird enthusiast already owned Twitter.com, and the founders weren’t ready to shell out money for the domain without knowing if their venture would take off (although they eventually paid up six months later, likely making someone a much richer bird watcher). This was a common reason behind the rise of companies dropping their vowels: When Flickr launched in 2004, it immediately faced the same problem. Its founders wanted Flicker.com, but the domain was taken and the owner refused to sell.

In 2010, Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake told the San Jose Mercury News, “I suggested to the team, ‘Let’s remove this “E” thing.’ They all said, ‘That’s too weird,’ but I finally ground everyone down. Then of course, it became THE thing and everyone started removing vowels right and left.”

After Flickr’s successful launch without its “e,” other brands began dropping vowels from their own names. For many companies, it made business sense: In the early 2000s, domains were being scooped up by startups and private domain hoarders left and right, and most companies refused to be held for ransom in their hunt for the right web address. Losing an “E” from an existing word made it far easier for some companies not only to find a domain name but also to register a trademark. For some brands, the decision to go “E-less” was less about URLs and trademarks and more about aesthetics and style. Christopher Price, the former editorial director for Tumblr, admitted as much in 2013, telling Wired that, “At the end of the day… it all comes down to one simple, absolute truth: Tumbler.com looks fucking stupid.”

This wasn’t just a branding phenomenon, however. According to John Riebold, a computational linguist at VoiceBox Technologies, the writing was always on the wall for the last two letters of “-er” words. He notes that “the ‘er’ — known as a syllabic consonant — in words like ‘flicker’ sounds like plain old ‘R.’” So why not just write it as so? Riebold claims, “The occurrence of these brand names is due to the ‘-er’ suffix being so common that even without the ‘E,’ readers know exactly how to pronounce the word.”

As far back as the 1990s and the first internet forums, some computer users began reducing their vowel use wherever possible for faster typing speed. Known as disemvoweling — which TIME ranked #42 in the 50 Best Inventions of 2008 — its prevalence increased as people continue to streamline their communication over mobile text messages and, in some cases, avoid censorship from moderators searching for specific terms. I have to admit that have always texted in full English, because texting without vowels is visual vomit.

The whole practice was dumb fun, and now seems synonymous with a time when the internet was a better place to be.

Yet, despite two decades of disemboweling making its way into the names of brands, the trend has been reversing in the 2020s. An annual survey from Crunchbase of more than 1,000 recently founded and funded startups showed name fads were on their way out, being replaced by more literal names — with all vowels accounted for. Crunchbase’s Joanna Glasner called 2020 the “year of the noun,” saying, “Funded startups are increasingly choosing brands made up of recognized words or names that describe what they actually do.”

Crunchbase’s survey listed new companies like internet browser The Browser Company, a clothing rental startup called Wardrobe, and a payment platform called Banked. Gone are the hip uses of the English language; it appears the new trend is just to come out and say exactly what you represent. All these names tell a potential user what they do in a simple and direct manner. As the old saying goes, “It does what it says on the tin.”

There are plenty of reasons behind the shift. In a world where we are inundated with more brands than ever, companies are switching to simpler words that are easier to spell and remember. We see company names every time we go online, so it’s easier to remember a brand name that doubles as the main product the company sells or service it offers. This reversion to plainly spelled words also makes sure companies’ names pass the phone test, which simply means if you told someone the name of your company over a call, would they instinctively know how to spell it correctly? The rise in AI and voice recognition technology also means that brand names with weird spellings or strange pronunciations may be harder to find via Alexa or Siri compared to a standard dictionary word.

Companies have also accepted that almost every obvious domain name has already been registered. Many have become more comfortable accepting an alternative suffix or adding additional words (such as articles like “the” or “go” or “get.”) to get the domain they desire. Businesses have also moved away from exclusively using .com domains and are settling for more unique, top-level domains like .shop, .me, .inc, and in the case of Twitch, .tv.

Like everything in tech and business, the name game tends to be cyclical: Back in the 2010s, every brand name seemed to contain an ampersand. The fashion industry was the biggest offender here; as Rebecca Jennings notes in Racked, the addition of an ampersand into a fashion brand name allowed it to throw any two words together — colors, places, surnames, etc. — and the brand name would suddenly seem to make sense. “All that matters is the tiny, adorable little ampersand that connects them,” she writes.

Around 2014, we saw an explosion of “ify” or “ly” suffixes, most notably with Spotify and Shopify. The Name Inspector counted 338 company names using ‘ify’ between 2007 and 2014 alone. My friend Marina Glazman, founder of decorating startup Suitely, said, “When we came up with the name Suitely, we instantly loved it. But within a few months of launching, we saw that this was a trend that was now blowing up. You had business names using the ‘-ly’ suffix where it made no sense. We kept our name, as it was just too good of a fit for what we were doing — but you don’t want your business name to be part of a trend. Trends have short life cycles.”

Indeed they do.

It was a dumb trend, but it’s hard to call out anyone for giving it a go. After all, you can’t dismiss the potential of weird names when a Silicon Valley garage-launched startup called Google is now worth more than $2 trillion.