Grammar rules in the tech world have always allowed misspelled words, Roman numerals and the capitalization priorities of a seventh-grader's MySpace profile. In Pittsburgh alone, the evidence is there in Wizzard Software's extra "Z," reCAPTCHA's runaway Caps Lock, Fooala's love of vowels.

National examples such as eBay, with its rogue "B," and the exclamation point on Yahoo! prove wacky names can transcend the tech bubble and achieve commonplace use.

But a world of heightened interconnectivity and constant news feeds has complicated the growing pains of companies hoping to jump from mispronounced gibberish to household-name recognition. Eventually a weird name may be memorable, but experts said those who go that route have to be ready to cope with consumer confusion and even shell out extra cash to make sure their lexically creative company can be found.

Just ask the officials at Saxonburg's II-VI Inc, who opted for numerals last seen in Julius Caesar's heyday and now associated with chemical elements. That combination also has a connection with guitar chords, according to a recent Google Alert set to search out information on the company.

Since the World Wide Web began weaving a network of tech companies, the urge to find fresh names has been evident.

In those first days, terms like e-mail and e-commerce made popular the "e" prefix that stood for "electronic." (Think eBay.) The millennium brought along the "i" craze, with the Apple computer company producing iPods and iPads that ruled the marketplace and spawned "i" imitators.

The next frontier in company vowels may be "u."

Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube itself have forced companies to emphasize interactivity with customers. Now, it's all about u.

"Next we'll have a 'y' for 'Why not?'" said Andrea Fitting, president and chief executive of the Fitting Group, a Downtown branding agency.

She recently helped a company called Insight to Careers change its name to uSooth. For a company that markets an intuitive approach to career coaching, the "u" relayed the personal aspect and "sooth" is a play on "soothsayer," an ancient word for prophet or seer.

The lower-case initial trend, she said, followed an earlier tech fad of mashing two words together and capitalizing both, like "BlackBerry."

Ms. Fitting said it was not necessarily a bad thing to force people to struggle with a name. The initial difficulty in figuring out how to say or spell it can help its "stickiness," or memorability.

"The pipe dream is that it will become a household name and everyone will understand it right away," she said. "In the meantime, you do have to explain it."

As a fail-safe to counter the predictable confusion, companies buy multiple website addresses (or URLs) that anticipate common spelling errors or mistakes. A misspelled URL will still direct people to the correct site.

One remote information technology company in Robinson - Sierra w/o Wires - owns about 25 addresses at $13 a year for each.

"Sometimes I stop and think, 'Why did I name the company that?'" said Founder and CEO Bruce Freshwater.

The reason: Sierra is his daughter's name and the "w/o Wires" part signifies that the company specializes in technology that's, well, wireless.

The company's advertised site is www.SierraWoWires.com, but it also has www.SierraWithoutWires.com, among other addresses, to catch those who want to offer their own variation on the unique company name.

The search site Google was an inspired and misspelled take on "googol," the word for the number 1 followed by one hundred zeros.

And that same search company now offers automated alerts that allow users to be notified of new mentions of a company name or other keyword. Investors can use the notifications to track real-time updates on various businesses.

But the Google Alert algorithm runs into some trouble when a company name is inspired by a different set of characters.

II-VI Inc. is a laser and infrared optics maker that works with elements from the second and sixth columns of the periodic table of elements. You know, elements like cadmium telluride and zinc sulfide MultiSpectral.

"We call them II-VI elements just like something like gallium arsenide is a III-V compound," said Michael McKinney, the company's marketing and communications consultant.

One recent Google Alert for II-VI linked to a YouTube video titled "Dean Brown Guitar Lesson: Minor II-V-I and the Melodic Minor Scale."

"One of the more difficult things is giving out e-mail addresses," Mr. McKinney added, since company accounts end with "eye-eye-vee-eye-dot-com."

Ultimately the company finds the quirky name boosts its industry credibility, he said, since customers have to be something of an insider to understand it.

Another company with character is M• Modal, a speech recognition technology firm in Squirrel Hill.

The company started as MultiModal, but decided to abbreviate and replace the "multi" with a symbol of two intertwined human figures. Designed by company CEO Michael Finke, the logo is often translated to a plain old asterisk in print.

M• Modal currently lets asterisk-free mentions in the media slide by, but the company's marketing manager, Lindsey Lowrie, said it may start requesting corrections as part of a new brand push.

She's hopeful for a time when the company could pull a Prince and mimic the music star's time using a symbol as his name. If the solo logo still needs further explanation, "We could be 'The Company Formerly Known As M• Modal,'" she joked.

Looking for more from the Post-Gazette? Join PG+, our members-only web site. You'll get exclusive sports content, opinion, financial information, discounts from retailers and restaurants, and more. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.