Have you ever wondered where the name Microsoft or Sony comes from? Today we take a look at their curious origins.
From hometowns to birthdays to personal nicknames, many of the world’s most famous company names have a very personal meaning for their founders. You’d also be surprised to learn how many of them made minor or even major changes to their name simply because the domain name was already taken.
What’s behind a successful company name? It’s clear that it takes a lot of brainstorming, some successes, some mistakes, perhaps a rebranding, and finally arriving at the perfect brand. You can probably guess the origin of some of these backstories—many quite surprising—behind the world’s biggest brands.
A company name is one of the most important ways to create a good first impression for a potential customer. It should be catchy, memorable, and not too complex, which often means companies choose to use short, memorable words.
It’s funny, but in the tech world, everyone knows by now that Google comes from a specific, large number called “googol,” which is the number 10 raised to the hundredth power , or 10 to the power of 100. This term has been around since 1938, though this wasn’t always the name of the giant Google. Its original lustrate was BackRub, the original name of the search engine.
Many companies’
fortunes can be made or broken by their name, so it’s influential to get it right—but how do you make that kind of decision?
Where does the idea for the Panasonic, Amazon, Samsung, or Dell logo come from? Or have you ever wondered why both a mobile phone company and a computer giant are named after fruits like apples or blackberries? (Apple or Blackberry, to go further.) Or why a social media platform is named after the sound a bird makes, or what a character in a Moby-Dick novel has to do with the world’s largest coffee shop?
No need to ask any more questions. We’ve traced the etymologies of many of the most well-known companies and present them to you in this photo gallery.
Nintendo
Nintendo was founded in Kyoto in 1889. From producing handmade playing cards to a taxi company and a love hotel, the business has gone through a variety of incarnations, but its original name has remained. In 1974, the company migrate into the electronics world, and a year later, it entered the video game industry. The name of this famous company comes from the Japanese name “Nintendou,” which construe as: “Nin” means “confident” and “ten-dou” means “sky.” In other words, it means “Leave luck to heaven.”
Acer
Founded in 1976 in Taiwan, Acer was from the word go called Multitech multinational. Less than a decade later, the company’s name was convert to Acer, which is the Latin word for “sharp, capable, or easy.” It can also be translated as “dynamicc, eager, or fierce” and also has several other connotations primarilyaccessory with the maple tree.
Atari
Atari comes from a Japanese word used in the historic game “Go” to indicate when an opponent’s pieces are in danger of being captured. When the American company was founded in 1972, they wanted a name with a Japanese feel and settled on Atari. Atari founder Nolan Bushnell once remarked, “In Go, when you’re about to capture an opponent’s piece, you politely warn them ‘Atari.’ I felt that was a good name for a company.”
Skype
The software company was founded in 2003. The original concept for the name was Sky-Peer-to-Peer, which became Skyper, but since the domain was already taken, they certain to change the company name to Skype. It was the first company to find an effective way to make online video calls.
Amazon
Although Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is already well-known for being basically a tech genius like Steve Jobs, the story behind Amazon’s original name is a curious one, as it shows us that even tech gurus get it wrong. Can you imagine if Amazon were called Cadabra? Well, almost… Here’s the story: In 1994, when Bezos was developing his idea for the world’s largest online bookstore, he originally wanted to call it “Cadabra,” a backing to the magical word “mumbo jumbo.” But he realized something was wrong when his lawyer thought the company was called “cadaver.” So, without further ado, he decided to change the name. He came up with Amazon in honor of the longest river in the world, the Amazon.
What is Twitter? It comes from brainstorming. A small group of employees at Odeo, the San Francisco podcast startup where Twitter originally started, had one of these sessions where they tried to come up with names that fit the theme of a cell phone buzzing in your pocket when you got an update. After narrowing the options down to just two, Jitter and Twitter, they wrote them down, put them in a hat, and let fate decide. They pulled the piece of paper out, and out came… Twitter.
The name Google was also born from a brainstorming session at Stanford University (USA). One of its founders, Larry Page , was thinking about a massive data indexing website, and one of the suggestions was “googol,” a number coined in 1938 by Milton Sirotta that is, in essence, one of the largest numbers that can be described. The word “Google” came about after one of the students accidentally spelled it, and Page decided to trademark the company name that way in 1998.
Xerox
A name starting with X? It might come as a bit of a shock. assuredly there aren’t many companies that spring to mind that begin with the letter X. However, in the case of the world’s largest supplier of toner copiers, Xerox, the name comes from a copying process called xerography, named after the Greek words “xeros,” speaking “dry,” and “graphia,” meaning “writing.” Its original name was The Haloid Photographic Company. After accomplish this technique, the company, founded in 1906, convert its name to Xerox.
Sony
The name of the Japanese company founded in 1946 in Tokyo, Japan, Sony, is derived from the Latin word sonus, pregnant “sound.” Why did they choose this word? Because it’s very easy to pronounce in most languages. Although it also has another association. It also refers to the American slang expression “sonny boys,” which is how co-founders Akio Moritom and Masaru Ibuka once described themselves. In 1950s Japan, being “sonny” meant being a young, intelligent man, among other things.
Microsoft
The truth is, there’s no great mystery to this particular name. It was in the first place Micro-Soft, with a capital “S,” a word that came from combining the words “microcomputer” and “software.” The name was coined by Bill Gates to act for the company that had been resolute to microcomputer software since 1975. As Gates told Forbes supplement in 1995, calling the company Allen & Gates (Paul Allen and Bill Gates) “sounded more like a law firm or a consulting firm, so we chose Microsoft before we even had a company to name.”
Apple
Many believe that Apple, named after the Beatles’ record label, smoothed out the rough edges of the word “computer.” Besides, with that name, we’d overtake Atari in the phone book,” Jobs said. So, without further ado, Apple was born in 1976, on April Fool’s Day.
Paypal
The now ubiquitous online payment service started in 1998, when founders Max Levchin and Peter Thiel created a mobile money transfer company called Field Link. But that name wouldn’t last long. Next up was Confinity, a combination of the first letters of “trust” and the last letters of “infinity.” But this wouldn’t be the last stop along the way. Confinity, with its wire transfer service called PayPal in reference to “paying your pal,” merged with Elon Musk’s X.com Corporation just a year after launch, and Musk decided to focus solely on the PayPal aspect and drop the Confinity name altogether. Since then, the company has made quick and easy online payments a breeze for users.
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