Finding Names in Unusual Places
Sausalito's Lexicon christened Intel's Pentium chip
and Apple's PowerBook

By Jamie Beckett
San Francisco Chronicle
Chronicle Staff Writer

When Lexicon Naming Inc. President David Placek is stumped in his quest for the perfect product name, he may find inspiration in jet-fighter videos, an organic-gardening magazine or even "The Ultimate Baby Naming" book.

Lexicon, which recently christened Intel Corp.'s new microprocessor chip Pentium, often finds creative solutions in unusual places.

"Sometimes you have to force people to look at something irrelevant," said Placek, a former San Francisco adman who founded Sausalito-based Lexicon 10 years ago. Tapping into such diverse sources as scientific and medical texts, mythological tales and Native American-language cassette tapes -- and using a proprietary computer program -- the firm has developed names for Apple Computer's PowerBook notebook computer, Hewlett- Packard's DeskJet printer, NutraSweet's Simplesse fat substitute, Embassy Suites hotels and General Mills' Triples cereal.

Pentium was derived from the Greek word "Pente," meaning five, to suggest the fifth generation of Intel chips. During the three-month search, Lexicon created thousands of names using its database of more the 1,500 high-technology words and word parts. Because the chip is an ingredient in a larger product -- a computer -- Lexicon also studied chemistry books and cookbooks to get a sense of what the names of elements sound like.

"In a way, we're putting together a puzzle for the client, and these are all clues," said Placek. The result of this research was a decision to use the suffix "ium," as in sodium or magnesium, and to match it with various high-technology words in the computer database. This formula appears to be successful. Charging about $25,000 per name, Lexicon has been able to increase revenue fourfold over the past five years, according to Placek. The firm does not disclose actual revenue figures.

Lexicon's eight-person staff, including two full-time linguists, looks for names that carry positive associations and convey a sense of the product's attributes. The ideal name also has a pleasing, memorable sound and is easy to pronounce. Increasingly, a name must be acceptable to an international as well as a U.S. audience.

Some Lexicon creations are fairly straightforward. PowerBook, developed together with Apple, conveys the idea that the product provides portable (book-size) computing power. But baptizing the Macintosh Quadra, Apple's highest-performance computers, was more complicated, according to Placek. Searching for words that would appeal to the product's target market of scientists and engineers, Lexicon combed dozens of scientific journals, math texts and medical books, finally selecting such words as quadrant (a geometrical term meaning a quarter of a circle) and quadricep (the muscle).

It then took the word segment "quadra" and electronically paired it with hundreds of suffixes and prefixes. But nothing worked. Every addition only made the name too long and awkward, said Placek. So the firm decided to keep it simple, and the word "Quadra" was born.