All The Tropes:What Do I Call This Entry?

Q: What makes a good entry title?
A: Short and snappy.

You are building a handle that can be used to pick up a concept and carry it around. If the title does not fit in a sentence, it isn't of much use. A title like Genre Blindness almost doesn't need an entry to carry the concept. If you can boil it down to a noun and an adjective, or even better just a noun or adjective, you've got winner.

But Not Too Short

If you shorten the proposed name down to a TLA, expect somebody to come along and move your trope to make way for a disambiguation page. There are only 17,576 possible Three-Letter Abbreviations, after all - by now, most of them mean more than one thing, and what comes to mind when you think of a TLA isn't necessarily what comes to somebody else's mind. (For example, there are hundreds if not thousands of people who hear "BFG" and don't immediately think of Roald Dahl's book Big Friendly Giant.)

Make sure the trope name means something on its own.

And Doesn't Mean Something Else

Related to the Three-Letter Abbreviations issue, there are some phrases that already have generally-accepted meanings in Real Life, and if your trope name is one of those phrases, people are going to think of the real-world meaning before they think of your meaning.

As an example, consider Mr. Miyagi from The Karate Kid: he's a martial-arts master, and he's old. So he's an "old master", right? Well, no. In Real Life, an Old Master is a European "painter of skill" who worked before the 18th century, or an artwork from such an artist. So "old master" is a bad name for an elderly martial-arts master, no matter what The Other Tropes Wiki thinks.

Before you commit yourself to using a particular title, do a web search on it. Chances are that you won't get any results, but if you do — especially if you get a Wikipedia match for it — make sure your name actually means what you think it means... and if it doesn't mean what you think it means, pick a different title.

For brainstorming on an idea, see the Trope Talk forum and the Trope Workshop.