Google didn't just build a search engine. It built a verb. That's a branding lesson and a legal one, and it's the clearest example I know of what I call word design.
When a brand becomes something people do
In June 2006 the Oxford English Dictionary added Google as a verb. A month later Merriam-Webster's Collegiate added google, lowercase: to use the Google search engine to find information on the web. A company name had become an action. Nobody says "I'll query a search engine." We google it.
Most brands would pay anything for that. Google's lawyers were nervous.
The risk: genericide
When a brand becomes the word for the thing itself, it can stop being a brand. Lawyers call it genericide. Aspirin lost its U.S. trademark in 1921. Cellophane followed in 1936, escalator in 1950 and thermos in 1963. Each one won the language and lost the name.
So in 2006, the same year the dictionaries came calling, Google asked people to use "google" only when they actually searched on Google, and to say "search" for everything else.
The ruling: keep the noun, get the verb
In 2017 someone tried to cancel the Google trademark on exactly that argument: everyone googles, so the word is generic. The Ninth Circuit disagreed in Elliott v. Google. Using a brand as a verb doesn't, on its own, make it generic. What matters is what the name primarily means for the product. Google kept the noun and got the verb for free.
Slang is intellectual property too
Here's the other side of the coin. In 2014 a teenager posting on Vine as Peaches Monroee said her eyebrows were "on fleek." Within months the phrase was in marketing from IHOP, Taco Bell and Denny's. She has said she was never paid for it.
Culture creates the words. Brands collect the rent. Much of the language that sells products starts in communities, very often Black communities, that rarely share in what it earns.
Compare Michael Buffer. He trademarked "Let's get ready to rumble" in 1992 and licensed it to games, music and merchandise. By 2009, ABC News reported, it had brought in over $400 million. The same words anyone could say. One person owned them.
Why designed words stick
Trademark law ranks names from strongest to weakest: fanciful (invented words, like Kodak), arbitrary (real words in an unrelated place, like Apple for computers), suggestive, descriptive and generic. An invented word is the strongest mark there is, because a word that didn't exist before you can't describe anyone else's product.
Memory works the same way. Researchers Tina Lowrey, L. J. Shrum and Tony Dubitsky found that a name's linguistic features, like its sounds and its wordplay, help people remember it, and that the effect is strongest for brands people don't already know. That describes most small businesses.
What I mean by word design
Word design is treating language as a design material: every name, label and framework is a deliberate decision. When I name something, the name is a compressed argument for how the thing works. Live, Give, Save is a philosophy in three words. Digital Real Estate is a way of seeing your whole online presence. I wrote more about the practice on the word design page.
Five moves for designing your own word
- Coin it. Invent a word or combine two, then check that nobody else is using it.
- Define it. Publish the definition on your own website. That's the deed: the place search engines and AI tools learn what your word means.
- Use it with a noun. Say "the STREAM framework," not just "STREAM," so the word stays a name and doesn't become the thing.
- Credit it. If the word came from a community, name them, and pay them.
- Protect it. Search the USPTO, then file. This isn't legal advice; talk to a trademark lawyer before you rely on any of it.
A word only you use is a search result only you can win, and increasingly an AI answer only you can win too. That's the quiet power of word design: it turns language into property.
What word would you own? Tell me, and I'll feature a few in Write On, my monthly letter.
Sources
- Google (verb), Wikipedia
- TidBITS, Google becomes a verb (July 2006)
- InformationWeek, Google warns not to google on Yahoo (2006)
- Finnegan, Google survives attempted genericide (2017)
- Generic trademark, Wikipedia
- Mekip Law, the trademark distinctiveness spectrum
- The FADER, Peaches Monroee interview (2017)
- ABC News, Let's Get Ready to Rumble worth $400M (2009)
- Lowrey, Shrum and Dubitsky, Journal of Advertising 32(3), 2003
I'm Terence Latimer: a creative technologist, writer and word designer in 29 Palms and Los Angeles. Find me at terencelatimer.com/links.