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contentVercel

Keep Nouns Consistent

MUST

MUST: Name each object once and reuse that exact noun in every label, heading, toast, and error — project/app/site/deployment for one concept reads as four things. Introduce as few unique terms as possible and keep a glossary.

Name each object once and reuse that exact noun everywhere it appears in the product

Bad

Good

Why it matters

When one screen calls the same object a project, an app, a site, and a deployment, the reader has to decide whether those are four things or one — and the safe assumption is four. Synonyms feel like good writing and behave like a bug: they break search, they break the mental model, and they make docs, support replies, and API names drift apart. Pick one noun per concept, write it in a glossary, and use it in every label, heading, toast, and error until the concept itself changes.

Built by Gleb Stroganov, design engineer at Evil Martians.

The rules come from other people's skills and guidelines — Vercel, Rauno Freiberg, @Ibelick, impeccable, Emil Kowalski, Tailwind, RAMS — each one credited on the Sources page. The work here is extraction and wiring: every rule is pulled into one corpus, given a good and a bad example you can operate, a MUST/SHOULD/NEVER rule an agent can paste, and a link back to where it came from.