On Grumium, the Jaw of the Dragon, and on the shortage of names.

One-sixth of the world's population use the internet. That's over a billion people. There were a million users of Blogger.com - in 1993. On the contrary, there are only tens of thousands of words in the English Language. So all the good ones are taken.

Now you can smashAllTheWordsTogether, as favoured by mySociety and object orientated programmers. You can go down the adjective-pronoun route favoured by roleplayers faced with a mental blank: a previous blog that I never really got stuck into was called Cobalt Dawn. Or you can come up with something that means nothing to anyone, like Consignia. Or Grumium, in fact.

But why Grumium? There's only so many dragon-related words, and most are gone. Stealing from a list of star names, it turns out that Grumium is the name of Xi Draconis, and means 'jaw', presumably in Arabic... a reasonably appropriate name for a blog. Plus Thuban, Rastaban, Altais, Alsafi and Giauzar had gone. Hopefully this dragon's jaw will spout wisdom and sense and have patience to not bite people's heads off unless they truly deserve it.

However, this problem of naming is... interesting. In many situations, account names cannot be reused: if Google were to reuse account names, then users could get emails sent to entirely different people... hence the difficulty will only increase.

For each person on this planet to have an alphabetical username, at least some will need to be seven letters long. And that includes 'alnjcgu' and 'xcmuwoc'. If the koremutake method is used, then that's five. Like 'koremutake', in fact or 'tragikugadri'. (All names other than koremutake generated by HotBits. I strongly believe that 'koremutake' was chosen for the sound.)

So, in a hundred years time, will our grandchildren scrabble for names that sound unique? Quite possibly. Hold onto your usefully named accounts... they might become valuable heirlooms that you can pass onto your children.