I just tested it for my own team name, and here are some of the beauties I came away with:

North Stucco Stumblers
Lucky Chillers
Hopping Steel Chameleons
Headless Turf Monkeys
Stealth Hillbillies
Macho Fire Strikers
Gritty Metal Aftermath
Bouncing Chemical Wheelers
Tri-City Green Wasps
Phat Vampires
Irrational Space Zealots
Pastel Beige Miltons
Hot Desert Crawlers
Tripping Silverbacks
Grunting Day Rats
Tainted City Burnouts
Giant Marsh Groundhogs
Hard Red Prawns
The Chemical Beancounters
Random Surf Rappers
The Champagne Patsies
Noble Longhairs
Limping Bush Hackers

If you need help with a specific team naming project and the Team Name Generator isn’t quite working out for you, sign up for a free Wordlab membership and post a New Topic to the Sports Team Names group Forum, and members of the Wordlab community will jump in and help you beat your arch rivals to a better team name. And see all the other name generators on our Name Generators page.

Let the school election campaign season begin!

Here is a batch of Restaurant Names I just generated, fresh from the kitchen:

Shitaki Lounge
Volta Kitchen
Flamethrower
Stuffed Shirt Tearoom
Jerky Jim’s
Plonk
Mystic Taqueria
Goat and Guru Bistro
Firebelly
Café Left Blank
Circula Restaurant

If you need help with specific restaurant / bar names and the Restaurant / Bar Name Generator isn’t quite working out for you, sign up for a free Wordlab membership and post a New Topic to the Restaurant Names group Forum, and members of the Wordlab community will jump in and help you cook up something delicious. And see all the other name generators on our Name Generators page.

Here is a batch of Character Names I just generated, fresh from the oven:

Cache Cherlin Wombatten
Nesbitt Contessa Sweet
Sleque Quincy Macropus
Delvin Umbria Snapp
Butch Tawny Logstopper
Nimon Chomsky Rugripper
Brandie Nastenka Pfinger
Froy Memora Nosewater
Xandy Zinca Black
Quiana Clishmaclaver
Bunya Sonny Wheeler
Lucifer Aglaya Jackleharp
Ally Bonner Zimley
Idalee Lesa Nickleby
Katima Opalor
Skip Tab Islip
Valterra Denver Windbottom
Velvet Lizzy Waters
Jetsam Gates
Stormy Angina Looney
Isanne Steffie Borington
Ariela Channery Bair
Zogg Tamber Spooner
Freon Brainard Graham
Phuel Trish Ding
Blaze Cloud Lockeroff
Laken Nutmeg Rhodes
Daj Randilyn Klosterfuch
Dijom Channery Eyelip
Freon Zabrina Poon
Maynard Feveria Jones
Xeno Hemp Wang
Chelsi Starr Fish
Artsie Hollie Cross
Skye Mystery Mooney
Bunt Modos Irwaks
Jimmy Pru Crampono

If you need help with specific character names and the Character Name Generator isn’t quite working out for you, sign up for a free Wordlab membership and post a New Topic to the Character Names group Forum, and members of the Wordlab community will jump in and help you out. And see all the other name generators on our Name Generators page.

Before you can do anything like what is described below, however, you need to sign up for a new account, which, as always, is free, and then log-in using the form in the sidebar.

Only snark, the site administrator, can create new groups, but there is a Topic for making new Group suggestions, so any groups that make sense to add and have enough users interested in, Snark will create for you. If you are interested in a particular existing group, click the “Join Group” button associated with that group, and you will instantly become a member of that group — or just post a Topic or reply to a Forum and you will automatically be joined to the group that Topic belongs to. As a member of a Group, you will have more interaction with the Group, its Forum and its members. Think Facebook Groups – same idea here.

If you want to post a topic for discussion, first find the appropriate Group, then click the “Forum” sub-navigation button within that Group, and fill out the “Post a New Topic” fields. You do not need to be a member of a Group to post or reply to Topics belonging to a Group.

For more helpful hints, see the FAQ page. Also see the sticky topic, “Getting started on Wordlab“, to help you get going. And if you have any direct questions for me, you can send me a private message from my snark profile page.

Welcome to the NEW naming playground!”

Some club owners look for name advice online. The website www.wordlab.com offers a forum for entrepreneurs seeking monikers for everything from hot-dog carts to big-city nightclubs.

“I am opening a new club in Ohio, and I can’t come up with a catchy name. … It will be mostly Top 40 dance music with some older stuff thrown in, and of course requests! Can you help?” a seeker with the Web handle TamaraLynn wrote.

Responses included “Shut Up And Dance,” “Galaxy Club” and “Frequency.”

Sixtoemoe wanted a name for a club focused on soul music. Responses included “Soul Survivor,” “Bought and Souled,” “Souled Out” and “Soul Beneficiary.”

Posters on the site have to weed through some attempted humor. To a person seeking a name for a restaurant and bar in Portland, Maine’s art district, for example, a responder offered “Chez Snooty.” Another regular on the site has repeatedly offered “Alcohol & Archery” as a name for a variety of clubs and bars.

Some people do get solutions from the site. The owner of a small bar near a cemetery in Portland, Ore., was offered “The Dead End,” “Dead Zone,” “Plotz” and “Spirits,” among other names. The owner wrote back, “Thanks, we went with Spirits! Great idea.”

Several responders urged owners and managers seeking names to keep them simple. A poster with the web handle Intellishag sought suggestions for a martini bar that would play “chill-out and sexy music” for “sexy young people.”

A poster with the forum name, Elemental, responded, “Think ‘short and sweet,’ ” and suggested several signposts, including “Clean,” “Steel,” “Chrome,” “Velvet” and “Mink.”

Logos and illustrations paired with a name add another layer of style and statement. One of Connecticut’s best known music spots, Toad’s Place in New Haven, uses the image of the well-dressed Victorian Mr. Toad from “Wind in the Willows.”

Toad’s Place owner Brian Phelps says the name was derived from a restaurant “named after a toad or a frog that matched with the French restaurant theme” the original partners envisioned for the place in 1975. The Mr. Toad logo was added later, Phelps says.

Manning, the naming consultant, cites Toad’s Place as a name that stands out amid a crowd of bars and club names that sound like perfume labels.

“There are thousands and thousands of clubs that have edgy, in-your-face names like ‘Ecstasy’ and ‘Opium’ – something sexually suggestive,” he says. “You actually tend not to notice. That’s not pushing the envelope. Something like Toad’s is in the other direction. You actually remember it.”

Remember, Wordlab is the best free naming and branding site on the web, bar none, and we challenge anyone to do better for less.

This is My Confession

Abandoned at birth, I was an illiterate orphan, a kindergarten dropout with boils all over my face. I often forgot to bathe. Burger King rejected me. I became depressed, began to lose precious self-esteem, and grew enormously fat. Nearing the end of my tether, I tried to join far-Right Christian cults, but they too would not have me.

Desperately in need of a bathroom one day, I inadvertently stumbled into the public library. Sure, I’d heard of libraries before – that’s where you got those funny bricks that come in all sizes and colors and open up in the middle.

On my way back out from the bathroom, I was inexplicably drawn to a glowing orb with buttons in front of it – a computer, I eventually learned. I began pressing buttons at random, and magical things appeared on screen. Since nobody hit me in the head and swore at me, I decided this must be a good thing, and I liked it. For the first time in twelve decades, I was learning something. Neurons that had sublet space in my brain to advertising agencies sobered-up and evicted their tenants. My mind was ramping up.

I learned, I thrived, I grew. I came back every day. I discovered the Internet, I discovered email, and I discovered chat groups, where I learned from others like me how to be polite, count out the proper amount of money when buying things in stores, and how to shave and shower. I learned what a President was, and I wrote letters to him. I lobbied Congress. I completed a Masters in Business Administration and a PhD in 9th Century English Literature through an accredited online university. I learned Latin and graduated top of my class.

Suddenly, I was everywhere, both in life and in the media. You couldn’t pick up a NY Post, Reader’s Digest or Le Monde without seeing my picture, or reading about what I’d done the night before with Elizabeth Hurley in Hungary, with Madonna in Mallorca, or with Billy Bob Thornton in Biloxi. I became very influential, and used my influence to change the world, one little bit at a time. Friends – and I now have many – urged me to run for office. However, I was beginning to get bored with my new celebrity, and desperately missed the many fond hours I had spent in front of the computer. So I abandoned my budding political career and instead became an Internet pioneer, right at the beginning of the most glorious economic boom in the history of the planet.

Again, I became fabulously famous, and everyone followed my every move. I was the ultimate high-tech guru. Confounding the pundits, I rejected offers to co-found the companies Amazon.com, eBay, Yahoo, and Google, opting instead to realize my life long dream of creating a new, better language for commerce and society. Yes friends, in 1998 I co-founded Wordlab with my partner quark, and the rest – as they will undoubtedly say someday – is history.

So you see, Mr./Ms. Anonymous, the computer is the most beautiful creature ever to share my bed – and I’ve had my pick of the litter, believe-you-me. I only hope it’s been as good to all of you as it has been to me. -Snark