List of company name etymologies |
This is a list of company names with their name origins explained. Some origins are disputed.
for similar etymological lists, see List of country name etymologies, etymology
# A B C D E F G H
I J K L M N O P Q
R S T U V W X Y Z
#
A
- adidas - from the name of the founder Adolf (Adi)
Dassler.
- Adobe - came from name of the river Adobe Creek that ran behind the house of founder John
Warnock.
- Akamai - Hawaiian for "clever,
intelligent and cool."
- Amazon.com - Founder Jeff
Bezos renamed the company to Amazon (from the earlier name of Cadabra.com) after the world's most voluminous river,
the Amazon. He saw the potential for a larger volume of sales in an online
bookstore as opposed to the then prevalent bookstores.
- Apache - It got its name because its
founders got started by applying patches to code written for
NCSA's httpd daemon. The result was 'a patchy' server—thus, the name Apache.
- Apple - favourite fruit of founder Steve Jobs and the name of the
record label of his favorite band, the Beatles. He was three months late in filing a name for the business, and he threatened to
call his company Apple Computers if his colleagues didn't suggest a better name by 5
p.m.. Apple's Macintosh is named after a popular variety of apple
sold in the US.
- Aston Martin - from the Aston Hill races (near Aston Clinton) where the company was founded, and the surname of Lionel Martin, the company's
founder.
- Audi - Latin for the German name of the original name 'Horch'. The founder August Horch
left the company after 5 years, but still wanted to manufacture cars. Since the original 'Horch' company stil there, he called
his new company Audi which the latin form of his last name.
B
- B&Q - from the initials of its
founders, Block and Quayle
- BEA Systems - from the first initial of each of the company's three
founders: Bill Coleman, Ed Scott and Alfred Chuang.
C
- Canon - from Kannon, the Japanese
name of the Buddhist bodhisattva of mercy. The name was changed to Canon to avoid offending religious groups.
- Casio - from the name of its founder, Kashio Tadao who had set up the company
Kashio Seisakujo as a subcontractor factory.
- Cisco - short for San Francisco.
- Coca-Cola - Coca-Cola's name is derived from the coca leaves and kola fruits used as flavoring. Coca-Cola creator John S. Pemberton changed the 'K' of kola to 'C' for the name to look
better.
- Coleco - began as the Connecticut Leather Company.
- Compaq - from "comp" for computer,
and "pack" to denote a small integral object.
- Corel - from the founder's name Dr. Michael Cowpland. It stands for COwpland REsearch
Laboratory.
D
- Daewoo - the company founder Kim Woo Chong called it Daewoo which means "Great
Universe" in Korean.
E
- eBay - Pierre Omidyar, who had created the Auction Web trading website, had formed a
web consulting concern called Echo Bay Technology Group. "Echo Bay" didn't refer to the town in Nevada, the nature area close to
Lake Mead, or any real place. "It just sounded cool," Omidyar reportedly said.
When he tried to register EchoBay.com, though, he found that Echo Bay Mines, a gold mining company, had gotten it first. So,
Omidyar registered what (at the time) he thought was the second best name: eBay.com.
- Exxon - a name contrived by Esso (Standard Oil of New Jersey) in the early 70s to
create a neutral but distinctive label for the company. Within days of announcement of the name, Exxon was being called the
"double cross company " but this eventually subsided.
F
- Fiat - acronym of Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino (Italian Factory of Cars
of Turin)
- Fuji - from the highest Japanese mountain Mount
Fuji
G
- Google - the name started as a jokey boast about the amount of information the
search-engine would be able to search. It was originally named 'Googol', a word for the
number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. The word was originally invented by a 9-year old boy Milton Sirotta, nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner in 1938 during a discussion of large numbers and
exponential notation. After founders—Stanford grad students Sergey Brin and Larry Page—presented their project to an
angel investor, they received a check made out to 'Google'!
H
- Haier - Chinese 海尔
- HP - Bill
Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company
they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.
- Hitachi - old place name, literally "sunrise"
- Honda - from the name of its founder, Soichiro Honda
- Honeywell - from the name of Mark Honeywell founder of Honeywell
Heating Specialty Co. It later merged with Minneapolis Heat Regulator Company and was finally called Honeywell Inc. in 1963.
- Hotmail - Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing e-mail via the web from a
computer anywhere in the world. When Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of
names ending in 'mail' and finally settled for hotmail as it included the letters "html" - the markup language used to write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with
selective upper casing.
- Hyundai - connotes the sense of "the present age" or "modernity" in
Korean.
I
- IBM - started by an ex employee of National Cash Register. To one-up them in all respects
he called his company International Business Machines.
- IKEA- founded by Ingvar Kamprad of Sweden. The name IKEA comes from a clever acronym
using the initials of the founder, Ingvar Kamprad, who was from a family farm called Elmtaryd, which was near the village of
Agunnaryd. The acronym is for a swedish phrase but it turns out to be the same in english, Ingvar Kamprad's Economical
Alternative.
- Intel - Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company 'Moore Noyce' but
that was already trademarked by a hotel chain, so they had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics.
J
K
- Kawasaki - from the name of its founder,
Shozo Kawasaki
- KFC - short for Kentucky Fried Chicken, the company
adopted the abbreviated form of its name in 1991 to avoid the unhealthy connotations of the word 'fried'. Recent commercials have
tried to imply that the abbreviation stands for "Kitchen Fresh Chicken".
- Kodak - Both the Kodak camera and the name were the invention of founder George Eastman. The letter "K" was a favourite with Eastman; he felt it a
strong and incisive letter. He tried out various combinations of words starting and ending with "K". He saw three advantages in
the name. It had the merits of a trademark word, would not be mis-pronounced and the name did not resemble anything in the art.
There is a misconception that the name was chosen because of its similarity to the sound produced by the shutter of the
camera.
- Konica - it was earlier known as Konishiroku
Kogaku. Konishiroku in turn is the short for Konishiya Rokubeiten which was
the first name of the company established by Rokusaburo Sugiura in the 1850s.
L
- LG - combination of two popular Korean brands Lucky and Goldstar.
- Lotus - Mitch Kapor got the name for
his company from 'The Lotus Position' or 'Padmasana'. Kapor used to be
a teacher of Transcendental Meditation technique as taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
M
- Mattel - a portmanteau of the
founders names Harold "Matt" Matson and Elliot Handler.
- McDonald's - from the name of the brothers
Dick McDonald and Mac
McDonald, who founded the first McDonald's restaurant in 1940.
- Microsoft - coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was devoted to
MICROcomputer SOFTware.
Originally christened Micro-Soft, the '-' was removed later on. A large number of jokes found on the Internet give other, more
coarse etymologies for the name.
- Mitel - from Mike and Terry's Lawnmowers after the
founders Michael Cowpland and Terry Matthews, and the company's original business plan.
- Mitsubishi - name coined by founder Yataro Iwasaki in 1870. It means "three
diamonds" in Japanese. The three diamonds also make up the company's logo.
- Motorola - Founder Paul Galvin came up with this name when his company started
manufacturing radios for cars. Many
audio equiptment makers of the era used the "ola" ending for their products, most famously the "Victrola" phonograph made by the Victor Talking Machine Company.
- Mozilla Foundation - From the name of the web-browser that
succeeded Netscape Navigator. When Marc Andreesen, founder of
Netscape, created a browser to replace the Mosaic browser, it was internally named
Mozilla (Mosaic-Killer, Godzilla).
N
- Nabisco - Formerly The National Biscuit Company, changed in 1971 to Nabisco.
- Nikon - the original name was Nippon Kogaku,
meaning "Japanese Optical".
- Nintendo - Nintendo is composed of 3 Japanese Kanji characters, Nin-ten-do
which can be translated to "Heaven blesses hard work"
- Nissan - the company was earlier known by the name Nichon
Sangio which means "Japanese industry".
- Nokia - started as a wood-pulp mill, the company expanded into producing rubber
products in the Finnish city of Nokia. The company later adopted the
city's name.
- Novell - Novell, Inc. was earlier Novell Data Systems co-founded by George Canova. The name was suggested
by George's wife who mistakenly thought that "Novell" meant "new" in French.
O
- Oracle - Larry Ellison Ed Oates and Bob Miner were working
on a consulting project for the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). The code name for the project was called Oracle (the CIA saw this as the system to give answers to all questions or some such). The
project was designed to help use the newly written SQL database language from IBM. The project eventually was terminated but they
decided to finish what they started and bring it to the world. They kept the name Oracle and created the RDBMS engine. Later they
kept the same name for the company.
P
- Pepsi - Pepsi may have derived its name from pepsin, an enzyme produced in the mucosal lining of the stomach that acts to degrade protein.
Q
R
- Red Hat - Company founder Marc Ewing was given the Cornell lacrosse team cap
(with red and white stripes) while at college by his grandfather. People would turn to him to solve their problems, and he was
referred to as 'that guy in the red hat'. He lost the cap and had to search for it desperately. The manual of the beta version of
Red Hat Linux had an appeal to readers to return his Red Hat if found by anyone.
- Rolls-Royce - In 1884 Frederick Henry Royce started an electrical and mechanical
business, making his first car, a "Royce", in 1904. He was introduced to Charles Stewart Rolls on the 4th of May of that year,
and the pair entered into a partnership in which Royce would manufacture cars, to be sold exclusively by Rolls. A clause was
added to the contract, stipulating the cars would be called "Rolls-Royce".
- RSA - formed from the first letters of the last names of its founders Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir and
Lenonard Adleman.
S
- SAAB - Founded in 1937 in Sweden as "Svenska
Aeroplan aktiebolaget" (Swedish Aeroplane Company) abbreviated SAAB.
- Samsung - meaning three stars in Korean
- Sanyo - The Japanese translation is disputed, although the Chinese name is
"三洋" (literally, "Three Oceans")
- SAP - "Systems,
Applications, Products in Data Processing", formed by 4 ex-IBM employees who used to work in the
'Systems/Applications/Projects' group of IBM.
- SCO - from Santa Cruz Operation. The company's office
was in Santa Cruz, California. It eventually went
bankrupt and split to form Tarantella. The remaining part of SCO was purchased by Caldera Inc (a spin off of Novell) and Caldera
changed its own name back to SCO.
- Siemens - founded in 1847 by Werner von Siemens.
- Slashdot - Slashdot is the parody of a URL.
While registering the domain, Slashdot-creator Rob Malda wanted to make the URL silly, and unpronounceable. (http://slashdot.org gets pronounced as ... slash slash
slash dot dot org)
- Sony - from the Latin word 'sonus' meaning sound, and 'sonny' a slang used by Americans
to refer to a bright youngster.
- Subaru - from the Japanese name for the star cluster known to Westerners as
Pleiades or the Seven Sisters. This star cluster features on the company's
logo.
- Sun Microsystems - its founders designed their first workstation in their dorm at Stanford University, and chose the name Stanford University Network for their product, hoping
to sell it to the college. They didn't.
- Suzuki - from the name of its founder, Michio Suzuki
T
- Tesco - Founder Jack Cohen, who from 1919 sold groceries in the markets of
the London East End, acquired a large shipment of tea from T. E. Stockwell and made new labels
by using the first three letters of the supplier's name and the first two letters of his surname forming the word "TESCO".
- Toshiba - was founded by the merger of consumer goods company
Tokyo Denki (Tokyo Electric Co) and electrical firm Shibaura Seisaku-sho (Shibaura Engineering
Works).
- Toyota - from the founder's name Sakichi Toyoda. Initially called Toyeda, it was changed after a contest for a better-sounding name. The new
name was written in katakana with eight strokes, a number that is considered lucky
in Japan.
U
V
- Volvo - From the Latin word "volvo", which means I roll.
W
X
- Xerox - The inventor, Chestor Carlson, named his product trying to say `dry' (as it was dry copying, markedly different from the then prevailing wet copying). The Greek root
`xer' means dry.
Y
- Yahoo! - an acronym for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle. The word
Yahoo was invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his book
Gulliver's Travels. It represents a person who is
repulsive in appearance and action and is barely human. Yahoo! founders Jerry Yang and David Filo selected the name because they
considered themselves yahoos.
Z
Also see
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