When a VP from Research in Motion flew to California in 1998, he had a little square box that could send and receive messages from anywhere in the world. He just didn't know what to call this new device.

David Placek, the founder of Lexicon, once started a meeting by asking, simply, "Where is the PowerBook, the Laser Tag, the black hole?" In posing such a question, he invoked Lexicon shorthand. He wanted to know which name had the potential to be an archetypal name that invents a category - like Power-Book, which Lexicon created for Apple. He wanted to know which name was simply the best way to say something - like Laser Tag, a game that started out awkwardly as Photon. Similarly, black holes were at first called "totally gravitational collapsed objects" and defined as collapsed stars with incredibly strong gravitational pull. No one could wrap his head around this term until someone rechristened the phenomena black holes - objects from which light could not escape. Popular astrophysics has never been the same. Lexicon is the largest naming firm in the world, based in the foggy enclave of Sausalito, a small town just north of San Francisco. At Lexicon, 17 staff members work in what is an essentially non-hierarchical firm, but the core Lexicon creative team is just four guys - David Placek, Steve Price, Marc Hershon and Bob Cohen - who have worked together for more than 10 years. The firm has a number of huge successes to its credit among the 1,500 names it has created; Power-Book, Pentium, Embassy Suites hotels, Levi's Slates Dress Slacks, Vibrance Shampoo, Subaru's Forester and Outback all-wheel-drive vehicles, Zima, a clear malt beverage, and Dasani, a new purified bottled water, made by Coca-Cola. Typical engagements yield several thousand possible names, some of which are reused in later assignments. A company that pays for the creation of a new name may browse the entire list of names generated during its project, but it purchases only the names it plans to use. Prices start at $45,000 per name. In 1998, when Dave Werezak, the marketing vice-president of Research in Motion Ltd. (RIM), flew from Waterloo, Ont., to meet with Lexicon in its Sausalito offices, he brought with him a functioning prototype of a new device invented by his company. It was a startling little square box - not much bigger than a standard pager - that would let people receive and send e-mail wirelessly from pretty much anywhere. Around RIM, employees working in stealth mode called their forthcoming system PocketLink. Although external focus groups were gravitating toward the name, Werezak and his team thought such a name would be the wrong way to go - it would do nothing to differentiate the new product or the company. Werezak says RIM knew it wanted the naming done right, so it called Lexicon.

Lexicon began by asking, What's the marketplace going to look like in two, five or 10 years? Would PocketLink remain a luxury item, or would it become a necessity? Would it quickly saturate the marketplace like the television, which spread from a 9% saturation of U.S. households in 1950 to 90% saturation in 1962? Or would it creep out like the telephone, which, although introduced in 1877, had by 1921 penetrated just 30% of households?

At the time Lexicon was working with RIM, Pitney Bowes, the business communications company, issued a report on workplace communications in the 21st century. The report, compiled by the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based think-tank, painted a picture of a workplace greatly altered by the advent of increasing messages - especially time-delayed messages such as e-mail, faxes, and voice mail and answering-machine messages. The study showed office workers sent and received an average of 190 messages per day. This is where PocketLink fit in: as a new way to deal with message flow.

The marketers at RIM wanted a wide audience, not just "early adopters" (those consumers who buy any technology when it is fresh), and they would seek a name that implied ease of use.

RIM told Lexicon it had about an 18-month jump on its competitors in terms of the technology: a critical year and a half to build its brand. Once RIM had signed on, Placek and Hershon created a set of objectives the name would have to communicate. Creating a persona for a new product involves linking it to ideas consumers already understand. As Steve Price describes it, every idea in one's head is connected to others - and these ideas form what he calls associative networks. "We want to know, How can we attach our new idea in a way that will make the associative network vibrate? We want people to say, 'I get it, and it takes me further.' "

"The task is to focus less on whether a name is immediately understood and liked by your customers," Lexicon noted in a list of objectives for RIM, "and to focus more on the name's potential as a vessel to weave an ongoing story that's larger than the brand itself."

According to Lexicon's standards, there are five categories of names. Words they have created from other words, like Power-Book, InDesign and LightNote, are said to be "constructed." Nouns, like Outback, Forester and Embassy Suites, are called "real" names. Words that did not exist before, like Celeron, Pentium and Dasani are "invented" terms. Then there are "classical" names, such as Merus, and "compressed" names, such as Optima (the word optimal without the l), Meridia and Industria. Phonetically, the structure of a name and its combination of letters affect ease of use, pronunciation and memorability. Lexicon asks itself whether the name offers a pleasing, rhythmic quality; whether it is constructed to create a balance between vowels and consonants; whether it is likely to be memorable because of its stress patterns; whether it conveys the right tone; and how well it works with any related corporate brands. The beverage Zima has a prosodic shape. Its CVCV pattern (C for consonants, and V for vowels) is a universally preferred shape for words in all languages. And the word has to sound right.

Consonants called "obstruents" are perceived as harder and more masculine; consonants called "sonorants" are softer and more feminine. Clorox - hard-working bleach - has obstruents; the perfume Chanel has sonorants.

Linguistic profiles help Lexicon to understand the unique strengths of possible names and to project their performance in the marketplace. For the RIM project, Lexicon noted: "Because the RIM device provides consumers with an easy way to interact with their desktop PC, we will want to communicate soundsymbolically 'easy access' and 'quick response.' "

The objectives Lexicon drew up stipulated that the new name had to support an integrated "new surface" on which to interact with important information when out of the office or away from a desk, that the new name had to be appealing to a broad range of customers - from the on-the-go CEO to the travelling salesperson.

When Werezak came back to meet with Lexicon in April, 1998, they presented around 75 name candidates to him on simple black-and-white cards. He was immediately drawn to the word blackberry. Among other things that first went through his mind was the thought: "There is no such fruit." Some Canadians call blackberry loganberries, and the idea of a totally fabricated fruit intrigued him. It was a small fruit, he figured, something you could hold in your hands.

Werezak also was taken by the symmetry of the name - that black and berry have five letters each. And he felt that a word ending in y was approachable. He liked the playfulness of the name. The colour scheme, he knew, fit well with the colour of the device. The team at Lexicon had been a big fan of the word blackberry, too, none more so than Marc Hershon, who had thought it up. For Lexicon, one initial thought was the device looked like a strawberry, with its 32-key keyboard reminding them of the pattern and texture of the seeds on a strawberry's surface. "Strawberry, as a word, was too slow," Placek told me. "Blackberry was much faster."

Will Leben is a Stanford University linguist who has advised Lexicon since 1989 on sound symbolism. "When you pronounce the word black," Leben says, "black starts out crisp. The b is exploded and the k is exploded. These consonants are called 'stops.' " Strawberry, on the other hand, is not a crisp - or fast - word.

Leben tries to ensure that the words they create mimic natural language. Looks are another part of the equation. In BlackBerry, by capitalizing the internal B, the eye sees that two five-letter words have been put together - and that they are symmetrical. The alliteration of blackberry, with its two b's, would also help people remember the word.

Using the word blackberry for a handheld device makes us think of a small, delicious fruit. Like Apple Computer, blackberry is friendly, says Leben: "A blackberry is something you like and you are not intimidated by. It's delicious and it's special - you find them and you think, 'How nice.' It's an everyday object, with pleasant connotations."

In his report, Leben wrote, "Compare BlackBerry with a more literal device, say Command Port, and you can feel the difference." BlackBerry implicitly says to you that you won't have to read a 200-page manual.

After Werezak checked out the list of name candidates, he invited Placek and Hershon to his firm's headquarters to show it to the RIM executive team, including founder Mike Lazaridis and co-CEO Jim Balsillie. At the meeting, the advance team from Lexicon chose first to present around 40 names to the group at RIM, so it would see the history of the project. "Sometimes if you just show five names, a client does not understand the amount of work that has gone on," Placek says.

At the presentation, Lexicon told a group of high-level Research In Motion staff and executives that, first and foremost, they would not like 10% of the names and that they would like 10%. The percentages come from Lexicon's experience with hundreds of client engagements. Lexicon also pointed out they could learn a lot from the remaining 80%.

The team was then given decks of thick card stock, which Placek says "makes the names feel substantive." The following words each took a page: AirWire, Badge, Banjo, Banter, BlackBerry, Cera, Cielo, Combio, ComTop, Cyphra, Dyrex, eBox, eTop, Evex, Game-Plan, Geode, Grip, Hula, IntraTop, LiveRide, Mica, Mini-Top, Nemo, OutRigger, Photon, Pouch, Reon, Riff, Ryto, Slide, Sling, Tailwind, Tecton, TelTop, Transilion, Transite, Veon, Verb, Vion, Vuant, Waterfall, Wheels, and WorldTop. Out of the 43 finalists, Black-Berry was the only one that really met most of the original criteria. It would "support an integrated 'new surface' "; it would appeal to a broad range of customers "from the on-the-go CEO to the travelling salesperson"; it "would deliver a quick, responsive personality"; it would not "limit the device to e-mail"; and the brand would carry the "expectations, beliefs, and promises [of] interactive access, integrated communication, convenient, wireless, portable, personal, and vital."

From the book: Wordcraft: The Art of Turning Little Words Into Big Business by Alex Frankel. Copyright (c) 2004 by Alex Frankel. Published by Crown Publishers, a division of Random House, Inc.

California-based Lexicon, the world's largest naming firm, has a number of huge successes, including BlackBerry, PowerBook and Dasani.