A big part of our jobs as software engineers is to name stuff.  We do it all the time when naming variables, controls database tables, etc.  We all (hopefully) have guidelines and standards we follow when we're doing this kind of naming.  But, sometimes we have to name more abstract functionality, like a feature of an application, for example.  Today I had to come up with a name for the tab that identifies a control that shows user accounts that haven't been used in a while.  This is going to (hopefully) help us keep our active directory store of web site users clean.

Well, it was kind of hard to come up with a good name!  Inactive Accounts made the most sense, grammatically, but is already part of the software vernacular for “accounts made inactive,” and that's not what we wanted to say.  So I went to my trusty thesaurus and looked up Inactive and within a few clicks ended up calling my tab, “Idle Accounts.”  I was pretty happy with this description, but now I'm wondering if there is a more systematic way of naming these abstract things.  There probably have been entire books written on the subject. 

-Brendan