About Business Name Vault

Business Name Vault is a naming reference for people starting a business in the United States. It covers seventy one trades, each with several hundred names sorted by the voice you want to strike and by the customer you want to win, a generator built from that trade's own vocabulary, and a plain account of what to check before a name goes on a vehicle.

The one rule

This site will never tell you that a name is available to you. Not that it is free to register, not that it is safe to trademark, not that nobody else is trading under it. No list can know that, and a list that implies it is doing you harm at the exact moment you are most likely to spend money.

What the site does instead is tell you where the answer actually lives: your state's business register, the federal trademark database, and the open web. Two pages here walk those searches in order and are explicit about what each one does not prove, which is the part most naming advice leaves out.

How the lists are built

Every trade has its own vocabulary, and the lists are built from it rather than from a generic word bank. A plumbing name and a bakery name fail for different reasons, so the pages do not share a template of adjectives with the noun swapped.

Before a page is published it has to pass a set of automated checks. No name may be repeated, on its page or on any other page on the site. No distinctive root may recur in a way that makes two names feel like one. No single word may dominate a list. The trade vocabulary section has to be made of words that actually appear in the names, so it helps you choose rather than reading as decoration.

One check matters more than the rest. No name on this site may contain a word like licensed, certified, bonded or insured. Those are claims about a status the site cannot verify, and a name that makes one puts the burden on you to prove it. Names that contained one were removed rather than kept.

What is written by hand

The guidance is. The two pages on checking and registering a name, the state filing table, and the vocabulary and pitfalls sections on every trade page were written and reviewed rather than generated and shipped. The state table quotes government sources only, and where a state's record was incomplete the row was withheld rather than filled in with a guess.

Who runs it

To supply: the publisher name, a sentence of background explaining why this person is worth listening to on naming, and a contact email address. This is the part of the page that does the most for its credibility and the one part that cannot be written for you.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, particularly on the state filing table where offices and URLs change, it should be corrected rather than left. Use the contact route above.