So what the heck is Kryptia?

About 2.5 years ago I decided to register a domain name. I figured that if I wanted to step up to that next level of geekdom, I needed my own web site with my own domain name.

Ah... but what domain name to register?

First rule of domain names: get a .com address. - Check.
Second rule of domain names: keep it short. This is more difficult than you think, especially when combined with the first rule.
Third rule of domain names: make it memorable. Often the second and third rule can conflict. xqzi.com is short, but probably not so memorable, unless you say it "ex-squeeze-y." Well, maybe it is a little memorable.

Then there were my requirements. I had to think the name was cool; very important. It had to be generic enough for any future use of mine, and if possible, sound "techy." I did have the intent of a computer security site, so this was influencing candidate selection.

I gave up the second rule pretty quick where my definition of short is 5 or less, and anything that makes close to any sense at all are pretty much all registered. My model was a domain of a friend of a friend that obeyed the first and third rules quite well, and had a serious cool factor to it: ghostbridge.com

Once you checked out their logo graphic, I was sold on the concept. What the heck did it mean? Was it a blog, a search engine, a router company? It was perfect.

Not only that, it sounded like one of those top secret codewords, "We've got to cover up project GHOSTBRIDGE, Congress will bury us if they find out."

After trying to think of some witty word combinations and resorting to writing a program to start generating ideas based on word lists (which failed miserably), I went back to the drawing board.

So I decided to go after something with the root "krypt" in it. I have always been into cryptology as a hobby, the study of secret writing. Krypt comes from the Greek, kryptos, for hidden, and I was really good at hide and seek, so this sounded sweet to me. I tried stuff like kryptic, kryptix, etc... and as expected, all of these were taken.

I found a website that let you create fake words given a root string, and you could tell it how close to English it should look. Eventually it spit out "kryptia."

Now this was pretty cool. The suffix -ia or -y is a noun-forming suffix in Greek meaning the state of, condition of, or quality of. "The state of hiding," or "a hidden state," both had a sweet ring to me.

The final domain name rule (well there are a lot more if you are serious...) is to see what Google thinks. At the time, there were almost no results for kryptia, except for alternate spellings of krypteia, a group of young Spartans who fought and killed Helots. Some historians believe this group was a "secret police" who helped subdue any unrest from the lower classes. I thought this was a pretty neat word, but sure enough, it was registered as well.

I also found another spelling that I liked as well: krypteria, but it looks like a German band and some mercenary group in the Netherlands already got to it.

So there it is in great detail, but after all of that, I am still not sure what kryptia means. I can't tell you whether this site is "a hidden state," my own little internet fiefdom tucked away in cyberspace, or whether this site is just prone to states of hiding, which generally means I point to this site.

Maybe you can decide.