The art of the company name. It’s a tough one to get right. Everyone wants to stand out, but developing the most unique and authentic company name can be highly competitive.

Company names are important though, because they provide your business with an identity – a brand for consumers to relate to and engage with. But with Companies House enforcing rules around what you can call your company, how much can you actually stand out?

It helps to know what phrases are already being used if you’re currently facing the tough decision of what to name your new company. We’ve dug deep into the data to reveal the most common words used in company names throughout the UK, while also looking at a few weird and wonderful wildcards.

Common words used in company names

Across 30 phrases commonly found throughout company names, five of them stood above the rest as occurring the most frequently:

• 1. Services – 253,230 mentions
• 2. Management – 158,647 mentions
• 3. Group – 120, 826 mentions
• 4. Solutions – 119,646 mentions
• 5. Holdings – 108,034 mentions

‘Services’ tops the list with 253,230 mentions – that’s 4.52% of the 5.6m company names analysed, making it undoubtedly the most common word used.

‘Management’ comes second, with 158,647 mentions. Although an enormous figure, that’s 37% fewer mentions compared to services. A similar story is told among the remaining three options, with ‘group’, ‘solutions’, and ‘holdings’ completing the list.

2015 vs 2025: What’s changed?

To get a slightly different picture, we also decided to compare changes in company names from 10 years ago to now.

We saw a very similar story being told among both date ranges. The same phrases from above were all well within the top five most frequent occurrences, with a substantial increase also seen in the sheer number of companies being registered.

More company registrations

We saw 42,297 companies matching our search criteria incorporated in 2015. In 2025, there were 114,024 companies – a 170% increase. Of course, this doesn’t include every single company registered regardless of their name, but it does imply there are more companies being registered now than in 2015.
 

Decreased associates

Only one phrase saw fewer occurrences in 2025 compared to 2015, that being ‘associates’. There were 1,101 companies with the word ‘associates’ in their name registered in 2015, compared to just 930 in 2025. That’s a subtle decrease of 15.53%.

The biggest increases

The other 29 phrases we looked at all showed increases in comparison to 2015. The most substantial of which being:

• 1. Labs – 80 in 2015 to 1,096 in 2025 (1,270% increase)
• 2. Prime – 134 in 2015 to 1,179 in 2025 (780% increase)
• 3. Innovations – 88 in 2015 to 615 in 2025 (599% increase)
• 4. Elite – 227 in 2015 to 1,284 in 2025 (466% increase)
• 5. Global – 1,174 in 2015 to 6,066 in 2025 (417% increase)

Weird and wonderful phrases

Sometimes a word may cause you to stop and think, so in that sense it’s done its job. With this in mind, we compiled a list of random phrases to see how they stack up as company names.

Our list contained random words like: dog, cat, soup, foot, leg, eyebrow, elbow, toilet, and even woof.

Despite one word appearing more than most, there wasn’t much of a noteworthy trend to pull from this list. Though it is interesting to see the lengths business owners will go to stand out.

• 1. Dog – 3,380 mentions
• 2. Cat – 1,404 mentions
• 3. Foot – 794 mentions
• 4. Banana – 289 mentions
• 5. Soup – 162 mentions
• 6. Woof – 131 mentions
• 7. Toilet – 72 mentions
• 8. Elbow – 66 mentions
• 9. Leg – 62 mentions
• 10. ‘LOL’ – 32 mentions
• 11. Eyebrow – 17 mentions
• 12. ‘LMAO’ – 1 mention

The imitation game

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so we wanted to put this to the test by looking at how often three of the world’s most well-known brands are also mentioned in UK company names.

Granted, some company names are less imitable than others (Nvidia, for example), so we chose three brands with words that could feasibly be used among others to create a different company name, those being Apple, Amazon, and Tesla.

Apple had by far the most occurrences, with 983 companies including the word in their names. Amazon followed with 199 mentions, and Tesla lagged slightly behind with 105 mentions.
 

Popular industries by company name

While the data from Companies House doesn’t categorise companies into industries, a lot can be learned from a name. We sought to determine which industry was most represented in our data.

Industries were identified by finding words commonly used in company names in that sector. Some industries have more associated phrases than others, causing them to be overrepresented.

By compiling these associated words and phrases (such as ‘construction’, ‘pharma’, ‘marketing’), we’re able to roughly aggregate the most popular industries used in company names throughout the UK.

The top three industries in company names

The construction industry stood out as by far the largest, with 69,302 company names using words commonly associated with construction businesses.

In second place is the technology industry, with 46,225 technology-adjacent words included across all UK company names.

Completing the top three is ‘Media and Advertising’ with 44,075 mentions of this and associated phrases.

Looking at industry growth in company names

Comparing industry categories between 2015 and 2025, our data suggests certain types of companies may have grown. It’s worth remembering this isn’t a perfect science, and company names alone are just that – names.

• 1. Clothing – 35 mentions in 2015, 272 in 2025 (677% increase)
• 2. Hospitality – 1,120 mentions in 2015, 5,195 in 2025 (364% increase)
• 3. Logistics – 1,446 mentions in 2015, 6,299 in 2025 (336% increase)
• 4. Retail – 329 mentions in 2015, 1,248 in 2025 (279% increase)
• 5. Media and Advertising – 1,546 mentions in 2015, 4,951 in 2025 (220% increase)

Rationale

Data for this blog post was gathered from the Free Company Data Product at Companies House. Each of the 7 parts were downloaded and analysed individually, and the figures combined to give an overall total. The data gathered was last updated 01/10/2025, and contained approximately 5.6m rows of company names in total.

The keywords used were selected using general intuition and common usage rather than a definitive list of all terms found in company names. As a result, the matching process may not capture every relevant variation, and some terms may not perfectly reflect how companies describe themselves. Phrases were found on an exact match basis, ignoring capitalisation.

Yearly matches were identified by querying the company’s incorporation date.

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