A Follow-Up on Pronounceability

Posted Wednesday, September 7th, 2011 at 2:11 pm

Late last year, I wrote about making sure your domain name is both spellable and pronounceable. Well, I just encountered a site that technically gets it right, in that its domain name is exchangebitcoins.com. But as soon as you look at their logo, which presumably tells you what they actually want to be called?

At that point, pronounceability falls apart, because their logo bills them as ExchB. How the heck do you say that? “Ecks-ch-bee” is the best I can think of, and that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. (Note that I’ve studied Russian, and so I consider words like znakomstvo only moderately difficult to pronounce.)

This BetaBeat story also calls them ExchB, and says in part: “‘ExchB customers can walk up to any of over 15,000 locations nationwide and make a cash deposit at any Chase or Wells Fargo branch,’ president David Sterry wrote last week.” No kidding he wrote it; if he’d tried to say it, I’m not sure what would have happened.

If anyone can tell me how to pronounce this place’s name, I’d be quite interested. I don’t mean to slag on them too much, but I’m honestly curious how their employees refer to their company in casual conversation.

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