What’s in a name?
Everything — when you’re running a businesses and want to attract customers. Since everyone loves a good pun, owners often try to incorporate cheeky word play into the names they choose.
The website Atlas Obscura picked up on this trend and published a map of U.S. businesses with name puns on Wednesday.
The map of “punny businesses” includes such establishments as “Fried and True,” a food truck in Austin, “Prints Charming,” a printer in L.A., and “Pinch Sitters,” a babysitting service in Brooklyn. There’s even a funeral home called “Goodbody Mortuary” in San Diego and a pub called “Torrey Pints,” near Torrey Pines, Calif.
The site teamed up with the news aggregator Digg to produce the map using crowd-sourced contributions. (The window for submissions is now closed.)
In all, they’ve documented over 1,900 businesses with name puns.
The map breaks the businesses down into 11 color-coded categories: bar/pub, cleaning/home service, coffee shop, doctor/dentist office, flower shop, food truck, nail/hair salon, pet care, portable bathroom, restaurant, and other.
The “other” category is mostly comprised of retail shops — in particular, lots of yarn stores.
There’s even a section called editor’s picks, that includes the St. Paul, Minn.,-based shop Purrrniture, which sells cat furniture (naturally).
Atlas Obscura admits that some of the names it has cataloged aren’t puns.
“Yes, an allusion to a famous movie isn’t technically a pun, and neither is a homophone of a naughty word,” says the story that accompanies the map. “But in the spirit of wordplay, we opted for an expansive definition of pun. Debating the relative merits of a particular business name is part of the pun experience.”
The project came about after Atlas Obscura staffers kept seeing businesses with pun names and began to wonder how many there are in the U.S.
“It was clear that we couldn’t find them all on our own,” Editor-in-Chief Reyhan Harmanci said. “So we put out a call for entries and submissions poured in — over 3,000. Once we cleaned and polished the data, it was around 2,000 different businesses with pun names.”
