Why I Named My Startup Avenire — A Word That Doesn't Exist in English

Avenire is not a real word. Not in English, anyway.

In Latin, avenire means something like "to come to pass" — the root of avenir in French, which means "the future" or "what is yet to come." But the English word? It doesn't exist. I made it up, or rather, I found it in the gap between languages and decided it lived there.

That gap is where Avenire the company lives too.

The word I found first

Before Avenire, there was avenoir.

Avenoir appears in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows — a compendium of invented words for feelings that exist without names. The entry reads something like: the desire to see your memories from the outside, to see yourself as others see you, to witness your past as if you were there but separate from it.

The word struck me the way certain ideas do, not because it said something new, but because it named something I already knew. That feeling of watching your own memories like they belong to someone else, the simultaneous closeness and distance of looking back.

I wanted to build something that had that quality. A platform that was intimate and expansive at the same time. That held your knowledge and let you look at it from the outside. That made your past learning visible.

I couldn't use avenoir directly — it's someone else's invention, and the company needed a name that was its own. But the sound of it stayed with me: the soft opening, the slight strangeness, the way it tilted toward adventure without landing there.

The novel thread

There's a character in my novel named Asher Ambrose.

The Weight of the Soul is a science-fiction fantasy set in a world where memory is physical, where the things you know and love have actual weight, where forgetting is a form of dying. Asher is trying to hold on to something he can feel slipping. He's not the hero in the conventional sense. He's just someone who cares enormously about not losing what he has.

I didn't plan for the novel and the startup to share thematic DNA. It happened the way themes do — you don't choose them so much as discover that you've been circling the same thing from different angles.

What Asher fears is what bad education does to people: it takes the living thing, the curiosity, the genuine desire to understand — and replaces it with inert symbols. Facts that have no weight because they were never connected to anything. Coverage without understanding. You go through the curriculum and come out the other side having lost something, not gained it.

Avenire is, in some sense, an answer to what Asher fears. A system designed so that what you learn actually weighs something. That it connects to other things, that it can be retrieved, that it persists.

I know that's a lot of weight to put on a SaaS product. But naming is serious. The name you give something tells you what you're actually building.

Why naming matters more than people think

I spent a long time on names before Avenire. There was Voidspaces — too abstract, too cold. Codeponder — too narrow, too literal. Each one felt like a costume I was trying on in front of a mirror and couldn't quite recognize myself in.

Naming a company is a philosophical act. The name isn't just a label — it's a theory of what you are. When you choose a word, you're choosing what you want people to feel when they encounter you. You're choosing the emotional neighborhood you want to live in.

I wanted Avenire to feel like: the future, but not tech-future. Not silicon and optimization and efficiency. Something older. Something that knew Latin was once the language of scholars, of the church, of the first universities. Something with a little gravity.

The words I return to when I think about Avenire are all like this. Reverie, the state of being pleasantly lost in thought. Aether, the classical element, the luminous upper air. They're all words that live at the edge of something, that feel like they're reaching toward a quality of experience rather than a feature set.

I think this is underrated in startup naming. Everyone wants to be clear and memorable and Google-able. Those are real constraints. But they're not sufficient. The best names don't just describe — they evoke. They make you feel something before you've read the tagline.

What the name commits you to

Here's the practical consequence of naming your company after a word that means "what is yet to come":

You can't build something mediocre. The name won't allow it. Every time you're making a decision about whether to cut a corner or ship something half-baked, the name is sitting there being slightly accusatory. You called this what?

The name makes the aspiration legible, which means it also makes the gap between aspiration and reality visible. That's uncomfortable. It's also useful.

The best names are the ones that pull you forward. That set a standard that lives in the product itself — in the quality of the writing, the care in the design, the seriousness with which you take the question "does this actually help someone learn?"

Avenire is what is yet to come. So every version of the product has to feel like it's moving toward something. Not just incrementally better, but oriented. Pointed at a specific vision of what learning could be if we took it seriously.

That's a lot to get from seven letters. But then, that's what good names do.