Why it's called Farangur
The app was born as Kufrant, after the Slovak word for suitcase — then I looked at the world map, learned what "kufr" means in Arabic, and went through two thousand domain names before an Icelandic word said yes.
For the first two and a half weeks of its life the app wasn't called Farangur. It was called Kufrant.
Kufor is the Slovak word for a suitcase, and Kufrant is a suitcase with a nickname — it sounds like a person, like the mate who always has a spare head torch. It lived at kufrant.lbmr.sk, I packed with it, and I liked the name. Honestly, I still do.
The world map
Then I decided this thing is not going to stay Slovak. Packing is the same in Trnava and in Jakarta; the sheet I copied for five years would be just as annoying in any language. So I did what you should do before you take a name abroad: I looked at what it means elsewhere.
And "kufr" (كفر) turned out to be the Islamic term for disbelief. Not a swear word, not a joke — a serious religious concept, the opposite of faith. In Indonesia or Malaysia, which are exactly the kind of places people pack for, I'd be walking in with a needless weight on my back before anyone had seen a single screen. An app about not carrying what you don't need, named after a burden. I can appreciate irony, but not that much.
Kufrant stays a good Slovak word. It just can't be the name of a global one.
Two thousand names
So I went looking, and I want to be honest about how that went, because the internet makes it look easy. I checked around 2,100 .com names. Bags, bundles, packs, setting off — that kind of word. The good ones — bagsy, bindle, stowed, possibles — exist, and every one of them is parked: somebody bought it years ago and is now waiting with a price tag in the thousands of dollars. My budget was a hundred euros. (I'm building a packing list, not a bank.)
What was left were either made-up syllables that mean nothing, or real words that already belong to somebody. I was quite far down the second list before I looked north.
Farangur
Farangur is Icelandic for luggage. That's it, that's the whole trick. Three syllables, no consonant cluster you have to be born in Reykjavík to pronounce, and it has "far" in it — travel, a passage. A word for luggage with the journey already inside. When I said it out loud it simply sounded right, the way Kufrant had sounded right in Slovak.
And then the part I still don't quite believe: farangur.com, .app, .io and .co were all free. All four. For a real word with a real meaning that almost never happens — it's the domain equivalent of a parking spot right in front of the door on a Saturday. I took the .com and stopped searching. Two thousand names, and the one that fit was the one nobody wanted.
What stayed
The mark didn't change. It's a soft suitcase with a wide handle and three compartments on the front — two full, the third still open. Those three compartments are the three phases every thing on a pack goes through: taking → ready → packed. The suitcase is drawn halfway through packing, because that's the moment the app is about.
The picture already said "luggage" without needing the word kufor. So when the word changed, the picture didn't have to; only the lettering was redrawn. The a, r, n and u are the old ones. The F and the g are new.
That's the whole story. A Slovak nickname, a map, a lot of parked domains, and one Icelandic word that happened to be exactly the right shape. It's at https://farangur.com, and it packs the same way it did as Kufrant — just with lighter luggage.