North Carolina companies have to follow certain naming guidelines when they register with the state. It doesn’t matter if you’re registering an LLC, corporation, or even a nonprofit, all companies must follow the same legal naming guidelines for North Carolina. However, these aren’t the only rules you have to follow.
Every company has to:
- Follow these Naming Guidelines from North Carolina.
- Not infringe on trademarks with their name.
- Following naming rules for their licensing board, if any.
In this article, we’re just talking about the naming guidelines from North Carolina.
The Laws for Naming Guidelines
There are actually a lot of laws about naming. Our General Assembly didn’t put them all in one place for us. However, the Secretary of State compiled many of them together for us.
The laws that apply fall into 2 categories:
- Reserved
- Misleading
Reserved Words
North Carolina has a list of statutorily prohibited words. These are words you simply cannot use in your company’s name without proper legal authorization. These words are:
- Bank, Banker, and Banking
- Mutual
- Trust
- Realtor
These are the big no-no’s, but functionally, they’re just as bad as the other administratively prohibited words:
- Architect, Architecture, and Architectural;
- Certified Public Accountant and abbreviations of such;
- Cooperative, Co-op;
- Engineer, Engineering;
- Insurance;
- Pharmacy, Prescription Drug, Drug, Prescription, Rx, and Apothecary;
- Surveyor, Survey, and Surveying;
- Wholesale.
Each one of those has their own separate reasoning. However, they all count as automatic rejections without first getting approval to use them. For the ones related to professions, you usually have to get approval from the licensing board first and attach that approval to your articles.
Theoretically, a name cannot be vulgar. However, if you search the Secretary of State’s website for vulgar sounding company names, they exist. However, keep in mind that you might not be able to trademark a company name that is vulgar or profanity.
Misleading Words
Next, you cannot name your company something that is misleading. That includes any name that implies you do something unlawful or something not permitted to do in your articles. For example, you cannot name your company “We Kill People For Money Inc.” That would be an unlawful name.
The Secretary of State’s office rejects quite a few names because the name implies the business is a professional company like a medical or legal office. Unless you’re a doctor or lawyer (respectively), you can’t imply you are.
You also can’t imply that your company is a governmental agency. If you try to name your company “The North Carolina Department of Farms,” you’ll likely see a rejection email. Additionally, the Attorney General’s office might keep a close eye on you after that.
How the Secretary of State Reads Names
It’s important to understand how company names are read throughout this process. Because of naming interpretation, two completely distinct names might actually be the same. For example, “Going 2 the Beach Inc.” would be read the same as “The Going two beach LLC”. That’s because there are a couple of interpretation guidelines.
- Numerals are the same written out or as Arabic numerals.
- Certain parts of speech don’t count like “the” and “it”.
- You ignore spaces. For example, “Popcorn” and “Pop Corn” are the same.
- Punctuation isn’t important at all. Your company’s legal name is the same with or without any punctuation you use.
- Company type designations like “LLC,” “Corporation,” and “Limited” only matter if they’re in the body or front of the company name. They don’t matter at the end, but you still have to have them in some company types. Therefore, you cannot have both “Goat Cheese LLC” and “Goat Cheese Co.” in North Carolina.
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