Short answer: sometimes. Common phrases are hard to register and most attempts fail, but "hard" is not "impossible" — and I've got a good example of that, because I called this one wrong in 2019.
Why common phrases get refused
The whole purpose of a trademark is to protect a mark that identifies you as the source of something. A phrase everybody already says doesn't do that. When an examining attorney decides your phrase is in common use — a widely used expression, a slogan people say without thinking of any particular company — you get a refusal, and it's one of the harder ones to beat.
That's what happened with "Hot Girl Summer" in 2019. Megan Thee Stallion coined it, it went everywhere, and then a pile of people who had nothing to do with it filed applications hoping to cash in. The USPTO refused essentially all of them. The later filings also got hit for prior pending applications, but every one of them caught the common-phrase problem: between May and October the phrase had taken on a life of its own and entered the general lexicon.
One examiner explained at length that the phrase implies young women enjoying themselves in a liberating way, in what may be the corniest official explanation of a slang term ever committed to writing. Corny, but the reasoning matters — because it tells you exactly what you're up against.
Route one: acquired distinctiveness
The standard way to overcome a common-phrase refusal is to show the phrase has become distinctive through your use of it — that when people in your market hear it, they think of you. It doesn't happen often. It requires real evidence: years of use, sales, advertising spend, unsolicited press, consumer surveys.
In several of the "Hot Girl Summer" refusals the examiners went further than usual and stated the refusal couldn't be overcome by acquired distinctiveness at all. That's an aggressive position, and as it turns out, not the end of the story.
Route two: use it somewhere it doesn't belong
There's one reliable way to register a common word or phrase: use it for something completely unrelated to what it means.
Think about Apple. Everyone in the English-speaking world knows an apple is a fruit. That's exactly why it works as a computer company — the word has nothing to do with computers, so using it there is arbitrary, and the USPTO loves arbitrary. Two unrelated things stuck together produce distinctiveness.
Same logic applies to your phrase. "Hot Girl Summer" on t-shirts and sweatshirts means what the phrase already means, so it's dead on arrival. "Hot Girl Summer" as the name of a car rental company would have had a far easier time — nothing about the phrase suggests renting cars.
So before you file: ask whether your mark describes what you're selling. If it does, you have a problem. If it has nothing to do with what you're selling, you're in much better shape.
What actually happened to "Hot Girl Summer"
Here's where I have to update my own post. In 2019 I wrapped this up by saying you can't trademark "hot girl summer." I was wrong.
Megan Thee Stallion kept prosecuting her application, and a federal registration for HOT GIRL SUMMER issued to her on January 4, 2022 — a little over two years after the refusals I wrote about. Applications she filed later in other classes have still run into refusals, so it isn't a clean sweep. But the phrase got registered.
The lesson isn't that the examiners were wrong. It's that a first refusal is an opening position, not a verdict. Trademark prosecution is a conversation, and applicants who are willing to argue, amend, narrow their goods and services, and build an evidentiary record sometimes get there. The people who filed opportunistically and gave up at the first office action did not.
The celebrity filings, revisited
I was pretty rough on celebrity trademark applications in the original version of this post. Some of that has aged well and some hasn't.
- Kimono — Kim Kardashian abandoned it and renamed the brand SKIMS. That one went how I expected.
- Blue Ivy Carter — Beyoncé won. The TTAB dismissed the opposition brought by the owner of BLUE IVY in July 2020.
- Taco Tuesday — the interesting reversal. Taco John's had held that registration for decades. Taco Bell petitioned to cancel it on the grounds that the phrase had become generic, and in July 2023 Taco John's abandoned it rather than fight. The separate New Jersey registration was given up that October. "Taco Tuesday" is now free for everybody.
That last one cuts both ways. A phrase can be too common to register — and a phrase you did register can become too common to keep. If your mark is drifting toward being the generic name for the thing itself, that's a problem worth catching early.
Can you trademark a slogan?
Yes, and it's usually easier than a bare phrase. Slogans get registered all the time when they identify a source rather than just describing the product. "Just Do It" doesn't describe shoes. A slogan that's purely informational — "the best coffee in Boston" — is going to struggle, because it's describing, not identifying.
Can you patent a phrase?
No. Patents cover inventions and processes. Words, names, slogans and logos are trademark territory, and creative works are copyright. If someone tells you they patented a phrase, they mean they registered a trademark, or they haven't done anything at all.
What it costs, and what to do first
Before you spend anything, run a real search. The single most common way founders waste filing fees is discovering after the fact that someone was already using something confusingly similar in their space. A knockout search takes very little time and saves a lot of money.
Our trademark registration service is $950 flat, which covers a comprehensive search, the application, and responses to office actions. USPTO fees run roughly $350 per class on top of that and go to the government, not to us. If your phrase is a coin flip, the search will tell you before you commit.
And if the search comes back badly, that's a good outcome. Finding out now costs you an hour. Finding out after you've printed packaging and built a following costs you a rebrand.
The short version
You can register a common phrase if you use it for something unrelated to its meaning, or if you can prove people already associate it specifically with you. Neither is easy. And if you're picking a name from scratch, the invented word nobody has ever said out loud is worth far more than the clever phrase everyone's already using — ask anyone who has tried to enforce a weak mark.
Wondering whether your phrase is registrable? Get in touch and we'll tell you before you spend the filing fee.
This post is general information, not legal advice, and reading it doesn't create an attorney-client relationship. Trademark outcomes turn on specific facts — talk to a lawyer about yours.
