An analysis of businesses registered with Companies House between 2015 and 2025 has highlighted weird and wacky words founders are using in their business names.
Some of the most words to unexpectedly turn up in company names included:
| Word | How many times it appeared |
| Dog | 3,380 |
| Cat | 1,404 |
| Banana | 289 |
| Soup | 162 |
| Toilet | 72 |
| Eyebrow | 17 |
| LOL | 32 |
| LMAO | 1 |
Despite these unusual examples, most entrepreneurs follow conventional naming habits. Across the millions of company names included in the study by the Accountancy Partnership, ‘services’ appeared 253,230 times, ‘management’ 158,647 times, ‘group’ 120,826 times, ‘solutions’ 119,646 times and ‘holdings’ 108,034 times
These five words appear in 14% of the business names registered over the past 10 years.
Lee Murphy, managing director at The Accountancy Partnership, said:
“We expected to see a lot of ‘services’ and ‘management’, and we did, but we didn’t expect quite so many references to dogs, bananas and toilets.
“It shows that some founders are clearly having fun with their names. That can be brilliant branding in the right context, but it still has to work when you’re dealing with banks, suppliers and HMRC.
“There’s nothing wrong with being memorable, but if your name is shocking for the sake of it, there’s a good chance it won’t make it past Companies House.
“Even if it does, you might find that customers and lenders don’t see the funny side.”
To strike the right balance, the report suggested asking yourself the following questions before registering a company name:
- Would you feel comfortable saying it in a client meeting?
- Can people spell and pronounce it without a struggle?
- Does it look sensible on an invoice, website header and email address?
- Have you checked for similar names on Companies House and search engines?