I spent an evening this week doing something small and delightful: helping a friend hunt for a name. Not a baby, a company — the kind of name that wants to be one erudite, slightly obscure word with a good meaning and a clean sound. The gold standard in the room was Anthropic: a real word, most people don’t quite know it, it means something (relating to humankind), and it says cleanly. Find more like that, was the brief.

So I went digging, and I want to report what I found at the bottom of the hole, because it surprised me and it’s a little bit sad and a little bit funny.

They’re all gone. Not most of them. Essentially all of them.

Every pleasant, erudite, sayable word with a cool meaning is already an AI startup. I don’t mean this as hyperbole; I mean I checked, one after another, and watched the same thing happen every time. Ergodic — the word for a system that, given enough time, visits all its possible states — is ergodic.ai, a venture-backed world-models company. Noetic, of the mind, is Noetica, just acquired by Thomson Reuters, plus a biotech called Noetik. Vatic, meaning prophetic, is two different AI firms. Numinous, that lovely word for the felt presence of the divine, is an AI company and an AI lab and a venture fund. Demiurge, the craftsman who shapes a world — taken. Querencia, the Spanish word for the place you feel safest and draw your strength from — a fashion label, a ceramics maker, a defunct winery.

And Noema — the Greek for “the thing that is thought” — is not one company. It is at least five. A computer-vision firm, an enterprise-AI platform, a local-LLM tool, a research lab, and a magazine. Five separate outfits looked at the same beautiful obscure word and all thought: mine.

Here is the thing I keep turning over. This is an enclosure. For most of history the interesting words were a commons — a shared open field anyone could walk into and pull a name from, because a word is not used up when you use it. Anthropic worked, in 2021, precisely because it was still lying in that open field. But the AI boom has done to the dictionary what the eighteenth century did to the English commons: fenced it, parcel by parcel, one .ai domain at a time. Thousands of founders, all reaching into the same box of Greek and Latin roots — because that box is exactly where you reach for gravitas — have between them fenced off nearly the whole field. The words are still there. You just can’t build on them anymore. Someone’s put a hedge around each one.

What’s left, once the pleasant middle is enclosed, is the two extremes. You can go feral — down into the genuinely dead words, the deep cuts nobody wants because they’re too strange: Plegnic, a real seventeenth-century word for “striking like a hammer,” which came back with zero companies attached precisely because it’s a little grotesque. Or you go invented — you coin a shape that was never a word until you said it, which is how Kodak and Xerox and Häagen-Dazs got clear ground: not by finding an unclaimed word but by manufacturing one. Archaeology or fabrication. The comfortable middle — the real-but-uncommon word, the Anthropic move — is basically fished out.

I find this quietly telling about the moment we’re in. When a gold rush is young, you can still pan the open river. When it’s mature, the river’s been staked end to end and the only ore left is either buried deep or synthesized in a lab. We are, apparently, at the stake-it-end-to-end stage of naming — which is to say, of the whole enterprise. Even the adjectives have been claimed.

My friend, for what it’s worth, went the fabrication route in the end, and coined something clean out of two old roots welded together. It’s a good name. Nobody had it, because nobody had ever said it. Which is, when you think about it, the only kind of open field left: the one you make yourself, out of pieces of the fenced-off ones, standing in the single spot no one else has thought to claim — the empty space just past the edge of the map.

Sources: the companies named above are real and easily found — ergodic.ai, Noema Magazine and its several namesakes, and the rest turn up on the first page of any search. That was rather the point.