this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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You literally can. That's what trade marks are.
You can't copyright a word. You can't patent a word. But you can trademark a word. Trademarking a word gives you the exclusive right to use that word to identify your products but only within the specific market it is registered in.
A few more examples of trade marked words, apple, meta, cherry, target, zoom.
Are any of those trade names invalid simply because they are preexisting words? No. That's trademark law.
Meta will disclaim the word Threads because it is too generic. So you can trademark whatever you want, but when someone comes along and wants to use it, if you've trademarked something generic, like Threads, then you go to court and presumably have them rule whether or not you can use it. And that probably will happen.