Stock up on short words

"Cwm" is not a typo: Three-letter words you didn't know existed

Need a few tricks up your sleeve for playing Scrabble? It’s not always the long words that will impress the other players: Sometimes it’s the surprisingly short combination of letters that none of them knew. Have you ever heard of unassuming three-letter words like "cwm" or "zax"? Those aren’t typos! Let’s explore some of the most obscure –yet perfectly valid– three-letter words.

Before you ask: it’s pronounced "koom". If you run out of vowels in your Scrabble set, this might save you. It refers to a deep, steep-walled valley, often carved by glaciers.

The term comes from Welsh, where it simply means "valley." Many places in Wales proudly bear the name, such as Cwmbran, a town in South Wales, or Cwmtwrch, a village with a name that translates to "Valley of the Wild Boar."

A "zax" is a tool used for cutting or trimming roof slates with precision. The word shares linguistic roots with seax, an Old English word for a short sword or knife.

Plus, in Scrabble, the mighty "Z" (10 points!) paired with "A" (1 point) and "X" (8 points) makes this one of the highest-scoring three-letter words you can play!

No, it’s not a mythical sea creature. "Voe" refers to a small bay or narrow creek that extends inland from the sea. These sheltered inlets are particularly found in Scotland, where they provided safe harbor for fishermen and sailors for centuries.

Some of these sailors were Vikings who once ruled the territory, and who called these bays with the Old Norse word vágr (bay or inlet.)

If you ever see a rowdy, loudmouthed troublemaker being kicked out of a bar in Britain, you might hear someone call them a "yob."

Here’s the funny part: There’s no Old English etymology involved. It’s just "boy" spelled backwards (a bit of Cockney slang trickery).

A very specific noun, but a valid one. A "pyx" is the container used in churches to hold consecrated bread.

The term comes from Latin pyxis, meaning "small box," which in turn derives from the Greek pyxos, a type of boxwood tree. Those three letters combined would earn you at least 15 points!

Have you ever seen the interior of a rock lined with dazzling, beautiful crystals? You might have been looking at a vug.

It’s a small cavity inside a rock that often exposes these pockets of hidden treasures, like quartz, amethyst, or more exotic gems. The word vug comes from the Cornish language, where vooga meant "cave" or "hollow."

Sure, playing "OK" is useful, but have you tried "Oka"? It’s a type of cheese from Canada, and also a historical unit of weight used in Turkey.

The cheese is named after the village of Oka in Quebec, where Trappist monks started making it in the late 19th century.

Gox might sound like the name of some sci-fi character. But it’s just a short abbreviation to refer to "gaseous oxygen."

"O₂" is the more common way to represent it, but "gox" is sometimes used by those in scientific and industrial contexts.

To be fair, you could pluralize any two-letter word by adding an S. "Xis" (the plural of the 14th Greek letter Ξ ξ) is no exception.

Just so you know, "xi" is not the translation of our "X," as you might think. What we call an "X," the Greek would call a "chi."

"Ait" is mostly used in Britain to describe little landmasses that pop up in waterways, like those dotting the Thames.

The word (sometimes spelled eyot) comes from Old English iegoth, meaning "small island." Though it’s not common in everyday speech, you’ll still find it in place names and historical writings.

Before they fully mature, newts crawl on land: this is when we call them efts. These tiny, bright-colored amphibians can be found around damp forests, looking like pocket-sized dragons.

The word eft has been around for centuries, coming from Old English efeta, which evolved to ewt, and ultimately to newt.

The gnu (pronounced "new" or "guh-noo") is better known as the wildebeest, that sturdy African antelope famous for its dramatic migrations across the Serengeti.

The word gnu comes from the Khoisan languages of southern Africa and was first recorded by European explorers in the 18th century. The alternative name wildebeest is the Dutch word for "wild beast," of course.

"Nix" means to reject, cancel, or put an end to something. The word comes from the German nichts, meaning "nothing."

It entered American English in the 19th century, likely through German immigrants. Over time, it became a snappy, no-nonsense way to say "no."

An "ulu" is a traditional Inuit knife with a characteristic curved blade, perfect for chopping, skinning, or even cutting a child's hair (yes, really).

The name comes from the Inuktitut word ᐅᓗ (ulu), which roughly translates to "woman’s knife"

because it was traditionally used by Inuit women for household and hunting tasks.

Changing names takes courage

For better or for worse? 10 brands that changed their names

Image: Kristian Egelund

Building a brand takes time, effort, money, and a lot of other things. That’s why, when someone throws everything overboard and starts again with a new name, more than a few eyebrows are raised. Sometimes these kinds of decisions are reversed. Prince changed his by-then household name to a symbol that no one knew how to pronounce—and later returned to being Prince. But sometimes, these name changes are successful. Take a look at the following ten examples of now-famous brands and their previously, often not-so-great, names. Did you know any of them?

Image: Giorgio Trovato

No one would argue that a name like AuctionWeb is more descriptive than eBay, right? Still, the online auction juggernaut’s founder, Pierre Omidyar, decided that eBay was a better fit. In 1997, he officially changed the company’s name and began advertising the website on a massive scale.

For some reason, Omidyar initially wanted to buy the echobay.com domain, but it was already registered by a Canadian mining company. Dropping the "cho" led to the name eBay.com.

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Image: wu yi

Everybody knows Nike, the global sportswear giant. But in its humble origins, it went by a different name: Blue Ribbon Sports. The brand had a distribution deal with Onitsuka (now Asics), a Japanese company. When that partnership ended, Blue Ribbon Sports changed its name to Nike, after the Greek goddess of victory.

Its famous "swoosh" logo was introduced at the same time. Carolyn Davidson, a design student, charged $35 for the logo, although Knight eventually gave her 500 shares of stock in 1983.

Image: Muhammad Asyfaul

Confinity was founded in 1998, originally aiming to develop security software for handheld devices, but it quickly transitioned to the digital payments market. The team began developing a digital wallet, which allowed users to store and transfer money electronically.

After merging with Elon Musk’s online bank, X.com, in 2000, the company was rebranded as X for a short time and later became PayPal.

Image: Jaimie Harmsen

Early internet users will remember the days when Yahoo! was the go-to search engine before Google. But even before that, founders Jerry Yang and David Filo—then students at Stanford University—created a website called Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web. It served as a directory of websites organized hierarchically, rather than as a searchable index of pages.

Thinking the name was too long to remember, they renamed the site Yahoo. Since the word "Yahoo" was already trademarked, they added an exclamation mark, creating Yahoo!.

Image: Aleks Dorohovich

In case you haven’t noticed, the full Kentucky Fried Chicken name hasn’t appeared in the brand’s official identity for quite some time. Founded by Colonel Harland Sanders in Corbin, Kentucky, the company became a fast-food behemoth that popularized fried chicken worldwide.

In 1991, the brand officially adopted the shorter KFC, a name it was already widely known by. Kyle Craig, president of KFC U.S., admitted the change was partly an attempt to distance the chain from the unhealthy connotations of the word "fried."

Image: Good Faces Agency

Different name, same concept—that could sum up MatchBox’s rebranding as Tinder. The original app launched at a hackathon in 2012, but the team soon realized the name was too similar to Match.com. They rebranded as Tinder, shifting the imagery from a box of matches to the small pieces of wood used to start a fire.

The company’s flame-themed logo remained consistent throughout the change.

Image: Alexander Shatov

Noah Glass developed a startup called Odeo as a platform for podcasting, but the venture hit a major setback when Apple announced that iTunes would include its own podcasting service. One of the employees then proposed an idea focused on "status"—short updates about what people were doing at a given moment.

This idea became Twitter, initially called Twttr, a service where you could text one number and have the message broadcast to all your friends. Years later, after acquiring the company, Elon Musk rebranded it simply as X.

Image: Mathias Reding

Every day, a sandwich shop is born somewhere in the world. In 1965, 17-year-old Fred DeLuca opened a sandwich shop to help pay for medical school, using a loan from Dr. Peter Buck, a family friend. In gratitude, he named it "Pete’s Super Submarines."

As the brand grew, the name was shortened to Pete’s Subway, and by the 1970s, the "Pete’s" was dropped altogether. According to one theory, the change was partly because "Pete’s Submarines" sounded a lot like "Pizza Marines" when advertised on the radio.

Image: Christian Wiediger

Before settling on Amazon, Jeff Bezos toyed with several names for his online bookstore, including "Cadabra" and "Relentless." He even registered Relentless.com, which still redirects to Amazon today.

Bezos wanted a name starting with "A" to appear early in alphabetical listings, and he was drawn to the Amazon River—vast, powerful, and world-famous. The choice was made, and the rest is history.

Image: Deeksha Pahariya

Everybody knows Instagram, the ubiquitous photo-sharing app that invaded every nook and cranny of the Earth with smartphones and selfie sticks. But before it became the photo-sharing giant we know today, Instagram started life as Burbn—a check-in app inspired by Foursquare, with extras like gaming and photo sharing

Founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger noticed that users overwhelmingly favored the photo feature. They stripped away the rest, rebranding as Instagram—a blend of "instant" and "telegram."