[michaelt]

The law actually contains a list of permitted characters [1]

Your company name can contain curly left apostrophe, curly right apostrophe, and straight apostrophe - but no lower case letters.

There are also a bunch of rules about specific words [2] - so you can't have "Financial Conduct Authority" in your company name without the permission of the government department of the same name.

[1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2015/17/schedule/1/made [2] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/incorporation-and...

[card_zero]

What's the problem with lower case characters? I feel like they just excluded them by accident because the table was getting too big.

[gpvos]

Easy way to make sure there are no company names that differ only in case?

[kmoser]

But that leaves open the door for "FOO[space]BAR" (one space) and "FOO[space][space]BAR" (two spaces) to be registered, so that doesn't really accomplish the goal of "company names must be unique." If case-insensitivity were really their goal, that could easily be accomplished by choosing a case-insensitive collation for their DB.

[llamaimperative]

Maybe to avoid ambiguity between I and l?

[CoastalCoder]

Ah, I see your confusion.

It's "I", me", or "myself" depending on context. The rules can be confusing, but in most context are not ambiguous.

/jk

[card_zero]

TRUE, FAIR POINT

[qingcharles]

Can you have a company name that is only curly left apostrophe, curly right apostrophe, and straight apostrophe? Asking for a friend.

[michaelt]

Possibly - I can't tell you though, because the official company registration website isn't capable of searching for that.

[selimthegrim]

Don’t give them too many ideas we’re gonna have eval, cars and cdrs next