In short, Tabella is a Latin word that means “small board” or “writing tablet” or “picture.”

Now, if you would like to know a bit about how Tabella became the name of our Catholic social network and faith content application, here is a brief history:

I have always been a fan of short and unique names for applications, products, and services. As a teenager and into my twenties, probably like many dreaming entrepreneurial young adults, I would always think of names and buy domains – always hoping to potentially sell them in the future… but till this day I have to admit I have never made a single dollar from what I always thought were brilliant names. Naming products and services was relatively natural to me and I got tons of practice while helping train hundreds of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. However, when it came to naming what is now known as Tabella, I became very frustrated with the process as nothing felt right. I thought of dozens of names, ran it by family, friends, and potential users of our religious social network – and even though many of them loved a few of them, it still did not feel right.

Around the same time that I attended my first Latin Mass at Star of the Sea Catholic Church in San Francisco and fell in love with the extraordinary form, I had a realization that the name for what will become the #1 application used by Catholics to stay connected to their Catholic community and grow in their faith, needed to be a Latin word. In a way, to point toward the beauty of the Roman Catholic Church’s origins.

I spent hours looking through a Latin dictionary. I think I must have read a thousand Latin words and their definitions. Some definitions were awesome and inspiring, yet the names had strange pronunciations that would never catch on. By the time I got to the words starting with the letter T, I was starting to get a bit discouraged. And all of a sudden, there it was: Tabella.

Tabella: In gen., a small board, a little table or tablet

S. C. de Bacch. Corp. I. R. 196

Given that our application is a social network for Catholics to write and communicate with their parishes and each other, the name seemed perfect. And personally, it means a lot to me that I found the name around the same time that I fell in love with our more traditional Catholic roots.