What’s in a name? Where the name Wibble came from

This is, without doubt, the most frequent question I get asked when speaking to clients – “Where does the name Wibble come from?” or some variation of this.

In short – it comes from a classic episode of Blackadder Goes Forth. The episode in question is Goodbyeee – the final episode of the fourth series of the BBC classic, where they are about to “go over the top” and in an attempt to get out of this, Blackadder pretends to be insane and will only respond to questions with the word…… Wibble!

You can watch the scene below.

And that’s it! I spent a long time deciding on the name for the company, bouncing between a number of phonetically memorable names and some that didn’t make it were: Scrunchy and BlipBlop – not sure what I was thinking with the last one!?

Why Wibble

There were a number of reasons behind the decision – I have a trait of overthinking things and spent far too long on the decision. But, below are the main factors in why I chose Wibble for the business name.

• Phonetics – the word Wibble does not have any sharp or difficult-to-pronounce sounds in it, phonetically it is a soft word with an approachable roundness to it
• Memorable – people I ran it past remembered it from when I presented it to the next time we spoke. I felt this was a key part of a successful business name
• Fun to say – people tend to smile and enjoy saying the word. I could have gone for a more techy name but wanted to have something that stood out a little.

Objections to the name

I’ve had a few people tell me that the name isn’t great and I should consider changing it. When first setting up the business, I was successful in getting onto the Entrepreneur Accelerator program and the name I chose came up as an issue from day one. My mentor, John Ferris, was not keen on it at all! I stubbornly refused to change it. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the accelerator and John Ferris but I am pleased I didn’t listen to him on this occasion.

Easter Egg – our 404 page

I’m not obsessed with Blackadder but we wanted to add a small feature to the site to further explain the name. Dean Anthony came up with the idea of a custom 404 page for the site, referencing the famous scene, mentioned above. Click the link above to see what we sampled from the clip to show when someone goes to a link on our site that has been deleted or moved.

Project Baldrick

Wibble’s next big in-house project that we have planned is our own pre-built WordPress theme – but without all the downsides to buying a theme off the internet. We plan to roll out a low-cost, easy-to-use WordPress theme that can be customised to your liking but fully managed by Wibble. The project name that we have given is Project Baldrick – Blackadder’s famous sidekick throughout the series.

Further viewing

When finding the videos for this post, I spent some time looking at clips of Blackadder. I really love the final scene of the episode that I got the name Wibble. It can be viewed below, the last minute of the clip is just incredible.