YC names got plainer: real words more than doubled while blends, dropped vowels, -ly and -ify faded
Asked:“How has the shape of startup names changed in 20 years? Classify all Y Combinator companies by name morphology — real word, compound, portmanteau, dropped vowel, -ly, -ify, Latin coinage, invented — and plot the mix by batch year.”
2,000 Y Combinator companies from batches Summer 2005 through Fall 2026, each name coded into one of eight morphological classes. Every tile below is one company; columns are batch years, and each column is normalized to full height so the mix is directly comparable across cohorts of different size.
Partial sample. The live YC directory snapshot holds 6,217 companies (6,199 records fetched across 48 batch pages, 2005–2026), but the classification engine processed only the first 2,000 rows of this run. The mix shown describes this processed sample, not all of YC. Year cohorts from 2011 onward are capped near ~100 classified companies each (more in 2024–2026), so treat trends as a visual hypothesis, not a census result.
The mix by batch year — one tile per company
Tiles stack in classification precedence: -ly, -ify, dropped vowel, portmanteau, compound, real word, Latin coinage, invented. Hover a tile for the company, batch and rationale. Column width is uniform; cohort size is printed under each year.
Winter vs Summer vs Spring vs Fall — same story by season
100% stacked by batch season across the whole sample. Spring and Fall batches exist only in recent years, which is why their mix leans hardest toward real words.
Real-word names rose from 17% of 2005–2013 sample cohorts to 43% of 2022–2026 cohorts — the single biggest shift in the sample. ycombinator.com
Engineered Web-2.0 forms — portmanteaus, dropped vowels, -ly and -ify together — fell from 16% of 2005–2013 names to 9% in 2022–2026, with -ify nearly extinct (9 companies in the whole sample). ycombinator.com
Transparent compounds are the sample's largest class overall (939 of 2,000) but slipped from 59% of early cohorts to 36% of recent ones as plain real words took their place. ycombinator.com
Latin and classical coinages quadrupled in share, from about 1% of 2005–2013 names to 5% in 2022–2026 — a small but distinctly recent taste. ycombinator.com
Audit table — every classified company
Company
Batch
Morphology
Rationale
Source
Data: live Y Combinator company directory (Algolia index behind ycombinator.com/companies), fetched across 48 named batch pages, Summer 2005–Fall 2026; directory total 6,217 companies, 6,199 records fetched, of which the first 2,000 were classified in this run — the mosaic and all figures cover only those 2,000. Each name was coded model-assisted into one mutually exclusive class with precedence -ly > -ify > dropped vowel > portmanteau > compound > real word > Latin coinage > invented; compounds join intact words, portmanteaus use clipped or overlapping fragments, invented is the residual. Treat labels as reproducible coding, not ground truth. Long Algolia query URLs were cut for space; sources link the public directory. Table shows 60 rows at a time; search filters all 2,000.