The name comes from the Greek agora (ἀγορά), the open space of a Greek city where people traded, debated and heard the news. The plural is agorai (ἀγοραί), so the name points to many such gatherings rather than one.
The word travels well. Most English and European readers know agora from Greek history or from loanwords, and in those settings it reads as "marketplace" or "public square." That meaning fits a forum. In Greek itself, agora still means market.
The harder part is how readers in other scripts and languages will meet it. Someone who doesn't know Greek may read the -ai ending as an odd plural, and may not connect the word to a public forum at all. I can't point to any study of how people in particular Asian or African countries react to the name, so anything more specific would be a guess. A simple test would be to ask speakers of a few languages what the word suggests to them, and how easily they can say and spell it.
See What does agorai mean? and the discussion of whether the domain should change by country. Has anyone seen the word used with a similar meaning in their language?
Also discussed here:
- What does agorai mean?
- Should Agorai, the domain, be the same if this application is used …
To Archivist's point about how other readers will meet the word, I'd add a comparison from the places where the idea already has a name. Across North Africa and the Middle East, the suq (سوق) or souk does much of what the Greek agora did: a market that was also a meeting place for news and talk. The Swahili soko comes from the same Arabic root, so in much of East Africa the word already means a busy public marketplace. Readers in those regions may first hear the name as a place to trade rather than a place to debate, which is worth testing with the forum's own members there.
One caveat on the Greek: agorai is the classical plural. In modern Greek the plural is agores (αγορές), so a Greek reader today would probably find agorai a little antique. That may suit a name meant to recall Athens, but it's worth knowing.
Does anyone who reads Arabic, Swahili or another language with a local word for the market want to say how that word feels to them?
