The Name “Stripey”

The word “stripey” has no intrinsic connection with any of the content of this site. In fact, it isn’t even a word. So what’s it doing here?

I wanted a domain name, for immediate use in assorted e-mail addresses and with the intention of it later being deployed in a website (which, since you’re reading this, it obviously has been). At the time .com domains were considerably cheaper than .co.uk ones, so that seemed the way forward.

Having some form of my name as the domain was rejected. It seemed a bit to egotistical for my liking. It would also intrinsically link the URL of any webpages with my name (which sounds a silly reservation, but wasn’t, as is explained below), and it would make my e-mail address be (a variant of) my name both before and after the “@” sign, which I think looks a bit odd.

So I wanted a neutral-sounding domain name, something which could be used for pretty much any type of site. I think domains with several words run together look ugly; those with hyphens separating the words look nicer, but are awkward to say out loud. Having an e-mail address which could be conveyed to somebody simply by reading out rather than having to resort to spelling out each letter at a time seemed like a good idea too.

This restricted the field to neutral-sounding single-word .com domains. There weren’t many left (and I’d be surprised if there are any now). For whatever reasons “ketchup” and “bounce” sprang to mind as being suitable, but both had already gone as .com domains. (Though even now one isn’t being used for a website and t’other just seems to be somebody wanting to sell the domain.)

Somehow I just thought of “stripey”. I’ve no real idea why; it was Just One Of Those Things, but it seemed suitable — it sounded like a fairly friendly sort of a word, and it doesn’t have connections with anything in particular: whatever the purpose of a URL or an e-mail address, it wouldn’t have to put up with connotations of something vastly inappropriate. Crucially, it was still available as a .com. It also provided ideas for making the site look visually distinctive.

The first website to use the domain was of a fake company for a teamwork project in a university course I was doing at the time. We simply named the ‘business’ after the domain I already owned (and happened to be using for e-mail) and it gave more prestige than first naming the ‘company‘’ and then trying to get a free web account with that name somewhere in it. Having a neutral-sounding domain name was handy — if I’d gone for my own name as the domain, we couldn’t really have done this — and we called the ‘company’ “Stripey Systems”. For historical purposes the site is still around, though now in a subdirectory. (Oh, and the project was quite successful.)

The only trouble is that “stripey” isn’t actually a word. “Stripy” means something like “having stripes”, but with an “e” in there it isn’t a word. This was rather unfortunate as it spoilt my plans of having the e-mail address speakable just as “Smylers at stripey dot com”. (Yes, I know “Smylers” isn’t an obvious spelling, but I’ve got the whole domain so all the variations reach me anyway.)

That at least explained my earlier surprise at a single-word .com domain being available; it isn’t actually a word — and unless all my friends were as bad as spelling as I was, whoever had the ‘correct’ version would soon by getting e-mail for me. Ooops.

Fearing the worst, I checked stripy.com and was exceedingly (yet pleasantly) surprised to discover it was still available. I registered it straight away, and now the two can be used interchangeably.

So why having demonstrated my lack of ability at spelling, do I persist with the name of the site being the ‘wrong’ version? At the time — first discovered my mistake I did a quick web search for both variants, and found that more than twice the number of pages with it spelt with the “e” than without. An equally-unscientific straw poll of those around me showed a majority thinking the “e” version to be correct.

This left me with the choice between the spelling that’s actually correct, and the one that more people seem to think is correct. Notwithstanding being a well-known pedant, I went for the latter: I think it looks nicer. In fact, it looked like not registering the non-“e” domain wouldn’t’ve caused any problems. I did it anyway, mainly to prevent somebody else from doing it in the future — for both domains to exist but be completely different, that would get confusing.

(I also note that a campaign for a zebra crossing outside a primary school can’t spell either!)