IT Milk: entry

When you sit down to register a catchy, brandable domain name, you will quickly find out that 95% of all the domain names you can think of are already taken. Unless you resort to stringing together multiple words to create a name longer than 15 characters, you will have a difficult time conjuring something original. I want to share a technique that has proven to be very useful when I buy unique domain names for my various web projects.

Have you heard of UrbanDictionary.com? The title explains itself, and it is a database of unconventional vocabulary words defined by the visitors. The site is unique because all sorts of new slang words pop up that you have never heard of before. I use this site all the time to look up words that are foreign to me, such as “riding dirty.” For instance, consider the word frenemy that popped up a few days ago:

An enemy disguised as a friend.
“I say, keep your friends close, and your frenemies closer.”

I am digressing a bit here, but another cool feature of Urban Dictionary is its multiple definitions for existing words from the points of view of visitors. Here is one definition of Wilkes-Barre:

Ethnic city-ette in Luzerne County, PA. Better than Scranton. Only prob is, nobody seems to know how to pronounce the name of this damn place.
Wilkes-Bar? Wilkes-Baar? Wilks-Barry?
Who knows?

So, with the plethora of user contributed words on Urban Dictionary, many are cool made-up words that are not yet registered with ICANN. I subscribe to the Urban Dictionary’s yesterday RSS feed on the lookout for catchy words that I can register: http://www.urbandictionary.com/yesterday.rss

Keep the feed open, scroll down for interesting and catchy words, and then quickly type them into the AJAX-powered domain search at DomainsBot. Although the majority of these words will be sexual insults, I guarantee you that you will come up with some new domain names for your websites in progress.