Quiz: Drug brand or sci-fi name?

last updated 11 January 2015

Which of the following are names from science fiction and fantasy, and which are brand names of prescription drugs? See how well you do.

1. Alixia: Non-human female? Or cancer chemotherapy?

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To be fair, there's also a selection effect: I picked ones that would be hard to guess. There are plenty of sci-fi and fantasy names that don't sound like drug names — in fact, fantasy novels often like the Celtic flavor, with lots of double l's and th's and so on, and sci-fi characters often have names pretty much like normal human names. There are also drug names that are more obviously drug names — and ones you see more often, like Prozac, that would be slam-dunks.

But what the names above have in common is that they are written to be catchy, or to have an exotic flavor. The least common letters in normal English usage are V, K, X, J, Q, and Z, and the least common vowel (when it's used as one) is Y. So words that use those tend to stand out more, and you can see how common those uncommon letters are in these names. On the other hand, many names that are thought to be attractive end in a, so that gets used quite a bit too. Drug names also are more likely than ordinary words to end in on or l or c for historical reasons.

But they still all conform to our expectations of what a word should be like. All of the names have sequences of consonants and vowels that are allowable in English (well, except Qvar, but we can still pronounce it). There's no Rfova or Ejxade. Most of them are two syllables, and they tend to have one syllable that is clearly heavier — it has a long vowel or two consonants following the vowel — so the pronunciation is clear. They may be exotic, but they're familiarly exotic.

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James Harbeck is a professional word taster and sentence sommelier (an editor trained in linguistics). He is the author of the blog Sesquiotica and the book Songs of Love and Grammar.

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