On top of fears that the world will run out of ice caps and oil this century is the added worry that it will run out of nice names for new things. The theory is that quickening global communication and commerce, conducted in such a way as to avoid nomenclatic repetition, trademark clashes or offensive meaning in any language, will eventually result in every possible private and brand name being used up.

There are assorted indications of this coming 'name drought'. Registrations of new web domain names are now falling, due to 'someone almost always having got there first', while the time it takes to find a unique name for a new MySpace account increases by 10 per cent each month. And, despairingly, creative minds at Nokia recently found themselves picking the same name - 'Prism' - for both their new 7500 and 7900 phones.

In the $700bn global pharmaceutical industry, those responsible for marketing new drugs are now tearing their hair out trying to come up with any new names which aren't familiar-sounding (so as to avoid being blamed for the doubling in medication mix-ups in US hospitals since 2004) and yet still incorporate those letters which phonologists say conjure the most commercially viable meanings: K, P and T (for effectiveness), L, R, S (calm), V (virility), Z (speed), X (super science) and Q (a wacky mixture of the others).

From Dubai, there are reports of a severe shortage of magisterial names for new skyscrapers, in the UK the Telegraph argued that musicians naming bands have reached both the end of the line and the bottom of the barrel; and in China the government recently began a review of how to discourage the number of citizens using the surname Wang before it reaches 100 million.