Naming things

Naming things is hard.

"'There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.' – Leon Bambrick"

General advice

 * Avoid ambiguity
 * Search for similar keywords in existing features, extensions, products, and projects, to avoid confusion and a profusion of hatnotes, redirects, and See Alsos. (e.g., Beta beta beta, Labs labs labs, Collection vs Collections, Page Previews vs page previews)
 * Make it easy to pronounce, to type, and to remember
 * Avoid l33t5p34k
 * Avoid difficult capitalizations (e.g., SyntaxHighlight GeSHi)
 * Don't use dashed-words if CamelCase is the local convention
 * Consider the translations
 * If it is a user-facing feature, this is extra important.
 * Is the name almost-untranslatable in many languages? (e.g., BetaFeatures (cf. T58537))
 * Is the name going to be extra-long in any language? (e.g., help, randompage, [better examples?])
 * Metaphors, idioms, and pop-culture references may have no meaning or different meanings in other languages or cultures.
 * Check it isn't a reserved keyword in the usual programming languages
 * This can lead to additional complexity in the code (e.g., Echo). For example: Puppet reserved words.
 * Abbreviations
 * For unavoidably long names, specify the short form.
 * People tend to shorten anything they can, especially if they write it regularly, as help-desk people and developers tend to do.
 * Contractions/Initialisms/Acronyms will be invented, if you don't plan for it. (e.g., visual editor is "VE" to many people)
 * Stick with a single name
 * Try to pick just one name, for both the code & the user-facing product name. Otherwise you'll have to regularly explain the past/alternative names, and deal with persistent confusion. (e.g., PageTriage/Page Curation/Newpagepatrol/Newpagesfeed, or Echo/Notifications, or Popups/Hovercards/Previews/Page Previews).
 * Renaming things is even harder: the first name used in public is likely to stick, even if you think it's terrible.