From “Scrabulous” to “Lexulous”: a losing move

First off, thank you to the people at Lexulous for reminding me of pending moves in my non-existent ongoing games. Seems like a bit of a desperate marketing attempt reminiscent of “You’ve already won!” junk mail. Secondly, “Lexulous” is a godawful name. It replaced “Scrabulous” in September of 2008 due to legal issues with that name’s similarity to “Scrabble.”

“Scrabulous” achieved much of what you’d want from a name. It’s catchy, simultaneously evokes ‘Scrabble’ (i.e., a word game) and ‘fabulous,’ is pretty easy to spell and pronounce, etc. But it failed one of the more objective tests for a new name—it was legally unavailable.

With “Lexulous,” the situation has been reversed. It’s available, but it fails just about every subjective test. It’s weird, hard to pronounce, evokes ‘Lexus,’ or ‘luxury,’ or maybe even something like “sexual.” It no longer rhymes with “fabulous,” rendering the “-ulous” pointless, other than a (probably failed) attempt to tie back to the original name. “Lex” as a reference to ‘lexicon’ or ‘lexical’ is almost entirely lost, and these aren’t tip-of-the-tongue words for the average person anyway (although maybe people who play these games have larger lexicons than the average person).

Obviously, name changes are sometimes necessary due to legal challenges. And when the old name holds some perceived value for current customers—brand equity—it’s understandable to try to retain some aspect of the name (although, see Snark Hunting’s diatribe on slight-change renames such as US Air to US Airways and SciFi to Syfy). But with several months between the initial threats from the makers of Scrabble and the site’s relaunch, you’d think the makers of a word game could have come up with something a little less…ridiculous?