There's Clusty, Kajeet, Zazzle and Ziggs.

Ooma, Yoomba, Oodle and Noosh.

New Dr. Seuss characters? Hardly.

These fanciful-sounding nonsense words are company names. And when it comes to choosing a moniker for a high-tech business these days, the quirkier the better.

"We've seen a massive migration toward whimsical names in the last few years," said Jason Baer, director of verbal identity at Interbrand, a New York-based branding consultancy.

And the trend is particularly noticeable with Internet firms and Web 2.0 businesses, many of which operate strictly online, said Baer.

Take Zazzle, a purveyor of digital images based in Redwood City, Calif.

Company founder Robert Beaver found the word "zazzle" in a slang dictionary and liked its meaning: sparkle, charisma and flair. Perhaps more important, other names he'd considered had been taken, a company spokeswoman said.

Zazzle's problem is hardly unique. New companies, especially those that depend on large numbers of people visiting their Web site, need a Web address that mimics their name.

With only 250,000 words in the Oxford English Dictionary and tens of millions of registered domain names, finding a "real word" name has become almost impossible. "Drop a rock on a keyboard, it'll be a registered name," said Baer.

And because so many real words are already spoken for, many companies have turned to whimsical coined words.

"If you make up a word, the likelihood it will be available goes up," said Laura Ries, president of Ries & Ries, a marketing strategies firm in Atlanta.

Of course, whimsy has its downside.

"Unless you have a big idea, a weird name is going to be a risky choice," said Ries, adding that, "in general, coined words are harder to establish simply because no one has heard of them."

They can be difficult to remember and hard to spell "and really go against you when trying to build a brand,"

names

From F1

said Ries. But when they succeed, their unique quality gives them extra power, she said.

One of the most powerful examples, of course, is Google, the popular search engine, whose name is a play on the word googol, which means 1 followed by 100 zeros. One of the tech industry's biggest success stories, the company's whimsical name itself became a verb and was added to the Oxford English Dictionary last year.

Perhaps hoping to become a verb themselves, a slew of new "double o" coined names popped up following in the footsteps of Google, as well as rival Yahoo! Inc. Yahoo is a word, although there is debate inside Yahoo over whether the founders named the company after the dictionary definition - "a rude, coarse person" - or an acronym for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.

At any rate, the "double o" name does have several advantages. For one thing, it makes graphic designers happy to have two circles to play around with, opening up many possible logo designs.

The branding experts say it has also come to mean "accessible" or easy-to-use technology, and companies continue to jump on the "double o" bandwagon.

Yoomba, an Internet-based communications company, launched in July. Ooma, an Internet phone company, also began operations in July. And RoadWired, a carrying case manufacturer, renamed itself Skooba, after one of its successful product lines.

California-based high-tech printing company Noosh, it must be said, joined forces with a company called Newline two years ago to become a business called NewlineNoosh, happily maintaining its whimsical root.

The "double o" trend, however, may be waning, according to Baer.

"Today the double o names are nearly ubiquitous, and at Interbrand we've seen a reluctance to go there," he said. "It's a fear of coming across as a copycat."

Whimsy, however, is still going strong at places like Blinkz, Boynq, Trimble and Pownce, which are, respectively, in the business of video search, audio products, GPS systems and personal online networking.

And not, it may be said, a law firm invented by J.K. Rowling.