The 7-year-old San Francisco company has filed nearly three dozen proceedings in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to block other tech companies from using the word “zen.” The tech world is known for its bizarre naming trends — as affordable URLs and untrademarked names have dwindled in supply, dropped vowels (Tumblr), odd suffixes (Storify) and bizarre compound words (Pinterest) have proliferated. Joshua Reeves, the CEO of ZenPayroll, said that the company was looking for a name that communicated the company’s goals of making payroll a simple, “peaceful” process for small businesses, rather than the headache it more often is. Longtime NBA coach and executive Phil Jackson is often referred to by his nickname, the “Zen Master.” The tech company appropriation of zen is just the most recent iteration of a phenomena that has been going on for a very long time. Nancy Friedman, a branding consultant who chronicles zen company names on Pinterest, pointed out that business jargon is filled with religious language, like the word “brand evangelist.” There are presently 724 live trademarks containing the word “zen” registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. For Zendesk, ideas associated with zen are now deeply ingrained in the company’s culture and branding. The company mascot is a Laughing Buddha, dubbed “The Mentor,” who wears a telephone headset. In its old Market Street headquarters, Asian-inspired green lotus leaves hung over employees’ desks. Zendesk claims that it only seeks to obstruct other companies from adding zen to their name when it could “create a genuine likelihood of confusion with our well-known brand.” Mark Lemley, a trademark expert at Stanford Law School, said that as a business-to-business company, Zendesk could have a hard time proving its customers might genuinely accidentally purchase ZenPayroll’s software for payroll instead of its own customer service software. In some cases, the companies Zendesk has sought to block have just given up, like the startup Zenbillings, which renamed itself Simplero because it lacked funding to pay trademark attorneys to plead its case.