Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio, Hey brain Stuff. Lauren Vogelbaum here. The writer of today's episode, John Paritano, rescued two cats from a local vet back in and named one Pandora. He says he was reading a lot of Greek mythology back then. A couple of years later, Pandora brand jewelry became all the rage. What if John had trademarked that name first, he and his
furry friend could have been swimming in cat treats. Yet, even if he had thought of it, according to two New York University law professors, it probably would have been too late to cash in. It seems that many of the words we use every day are already trademarked, which means it's difficult for entrepreneurs to find good names for
new companies. Take Pandora, for instance. Search the U S Patent and Trademark Office database and you'd find a number of companies that already used Pandora in their name, avatars, and logos. There's a Pandora hair collection, Pandora Radio, and yes, Pandora's box. The two professors looked at the six point seven million trademark applications filed at the U S. Patent
and Trademark Office between two thousand three and sixteen. They then studied a database of the hundred thousand most frequently used words in American English. It's called the Corpus of
Contemporary American English. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, there are a bit under two hundred thousand words currently in use in the English language, but according to the website test your rocab dot com, the median adult native English speaker knows only about twenty to thirty five thousand of them. But back to the study, The authors also reviewed a U S Census list of the a hundred and fifty one thousand, six hundred seventy two most frequently occurring surnames
in the United States. What they found will knock your socks off, which by the way, is also trademarked. They wrote in a teen issue of the Harvard Law Review, the data to present compelling evidence of substantial word mark depletion, particularly with respect to the sets of potential marks that businesses prefer. Most standard English words, short neologisms that are pronounceable by English speakers, and common American surnames. Neologism is
a term for newly coined words or expressions. As best we can tell, neologism is still available to be trademarked, though other common words do have pending registrations, including even the word the yes. The currently has eleven active trademark resignations. The result of so many trademarks is that new businesses have to strain their noggins, and yes, variations of noggin are already taken to come up with monikers that aren't already claimed, or resort to what's called a parallel registration.
That's when two companies use the exact same name as long as it won't confuse consumers, for example, Delta Faucets versus Delta Airlines. The authors wrote, given these conditions, new
applicants are increasingly resorting to suboptimal marks. The data indicate that applicants are applying less often for standard English words and common surnames, and more often for complex marks as measured by character syllable and word count, and all of this could likely explain why we see more company names like flicker, Tumbler, and Lift, all of which leave out
letters or incorporate other misspellings of common words. Today's episode was written by John Paritano and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other wordy topics, visit how stuffworks dot com. Brain Stuff is production of iHeart Radio. Or more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,