Goods & services wording

Alongside a Nice class, every trademark application has to describe — in words — exactly what the mark covers. "Clothing" is too vague to file with directly; "T-shirts" is specific enough. This description does two jobs at once: it tells the examiner what to compare your mark against, and it defines the actual boundary of what your registration protects once it issues.

Why custom wording costs more

USPTO maintains a large list — the "ID Manual" — of pre-approved wording it already knows is acceptable, organized by class. Since January 2025, USPTO charges a $200-per-class surcharge for any goods or services description that isn't pulled from that list, on top of the base filing fee. Two applications describing the identical product — one using ID Manual wording, one phrased slightly differently by hand — can differ by hundreds of dollars for that reason alone.

Specific beats vague, either way

Even ignoring the fee, vague wording is a liability on its own. "Computer software" covers an enormous, crowded field — an examiner is far more likely to find a conflicting registration against wording that broad than against "downloadable mobile application software for tracking fitness goals." Narrower, accurate wording both reduces false conflicts in a search like this one and gives you a cleaner path through examination.

What this means for a search

Because the wording drives what an examiner actually compares, it's also one of the things a good clearance search looks at — not just whether another company registered the same class number, but whether their actual goods/services description overlaps with yours in substance. Two companies in the same class with genuinely unrelated products may not conflict at all; two companies in adjacent classes with near-identical wording might.