Why the username you want is always taken, and how to pick one you will keep

Every app wants one, and the good ones are gone

I design apps for a living, and the username step is the part of signing up I would most like to fix. Sign up for almost anything and the second question is the same: pick a username. Email, games, social apps, forums, chat apps. Each one wants a name that nobody else on that service has ever taken.

That is the problem. Short, real words went to early users years ago, and most services never free them up. The name you want is not taken because you were slow; it was taken before you had the idea.

Small changes rarely help either. Gmail ignores dots in addresses, so jane.smith and janesmith are the same account to Gmail, and if one is taken, so is the other.

My advice is to accept early that the obvious name is gone. The rest gets easier from there.

What a username says about you

A username is public on most services. Anyone can see it, search for it and paste it into a search engine to see where else it turns up.

That is fine for a work profile you want people to find. It is less fine when the username carries your real name, the year you were born or the town you grew up in. Those are exactly the details used to guess security questions and to piece together who someone is.

Some apps make a username more public than people expect. On Telegram, a username is optional, but once you set one, anyone can find you in global search and message you, even without your phone number.

Decide first: one name everywhere, or different ones

This is the choice I make before I think about the name itself, because it settles most of what follows.

One name everywhere makes sense for anything you want people to find and connect: a portfolio, a newsletter, a public profile for your work. Being recognisable is the point.

A different name per account makes sense for everything else: the hobby forum, the game, the second social account. The same handle on every site is the simplest way for a stranger, or an employer, to link them all with one search.

I need both, and so do most people. I think of it as one public name, used on purpose, and a stack of private ones that do not need to match anything.

Every site has different rules

The same name can be valid on one service and rejected on the next, because each one sets its own rules.

• Gmail allows letters, numbers and periods, from 6 to 30 characters, and no underscores or hyphens.
• Telegram allows letters, numbers and underscores, and treats upper and lower case as the same name.

A name built from plain letters, with no separators at all, passes both. That is the reason I lean towards two ordinary words joined together: quietotter works almost everywhere, while quiet_otter and quiet.otter each break somewhere. Shorter is also safer, since many sites cap the length.

Some names are permanent

Most apps let you change a username later. Not all of them do.

Reddit is the clearest example: once an account is created, its username cannot be changed. The only way to a new name is a new account, starting again from zero.

So how long I spend on a name depends on the account. For something I expect to keep for years, I think it through. For a one-off sign-up, I take the first free name and move on.

How to pick one that is free

This is the method I use for any new account:

1. Decide whether it is a public name or a private one.
2. Pick two plain words that do not describe you: an adjective and a noun work well.
3. Say it out loud. If you would have to spell it for someone, try again.
4. Try it on the sign-up page of the service you actually want. Availability is only known there.
5. If it is taken, change a word rather than adding a number that looks like a year.

Coming up with fresh word pairs is the slow part, which is why we built a username generator. It makes short, readable usernames from random word pairs, lets you choose the separator, letter case and maximum length, and runs entirely in your browser, so the names you try are not sent anywhere. It cannot check whether a name is free on a given service; that check only happens on the service’s own sign-up page.

A name you will not regret

To me, a good username is easy to say, fits the rules of the site you are joining and tells a stranger nothing useful. Everything else is taste.

Choose the public name carefully, keep the private ones different from each other, and leave your birthday out of all of them.

If you are setting up a new account right now, open the username generator, generate a handful and try the one you like best.