In 2004 I registered Clyral as a company. Believe it or not, this was after much thought and debate over an appropriate name for the organistion. I have been asked many times about the origin of the name and so decided to summarise the story here.

Creating a new word

Contrary to what most people assume, there is no witty formulae from which the name ‘Clyral’ was derived. No, we did not combine letters from our names with star signs or mothers birth dates. At the end of the day we wanted to register a short punchy dot com website domain that matched our company name. Unfortunately almost every word in the English dictionary was already registered by 2004, together with millions of combinations, many of which we tried to register. Although this limitation was real, the company was very much about creativity, and it seemed fitting to create a totally new sounding word that we could own and could be our identity.

Inspiration

The name Clyral was inspired by two science fiction character names; ‘Kal-El’ (Supermans birth name on Kryptonite) and ‘Klorel’ (An alien character from the Stargate SG1 TV series). If you are a Stargate fan, or bother investigating, please ignore the fact that Klorel was an evil parasitic alien. There is intentionally no inherent meaning in the name Clyral other than what we imply through who we are as a company. If you desire some significance in the name, we would rather borrow more noble virtues from the character of Superman.

Pronounciation

We are fascinated by the many variations on the pronunciation that constantly emerge, especially considering the diverse languages and accents we are exposed to in South African call centers. Clyral is correctly pronounced klahy-ral (kla?’ ræl).