- Bluetooth is one of them.
Do you know about the seven things that were named as jokes? Like Yahoo or Pink Floyd?
Google
Google’s name came from a mathematical term: “googol,” meaning the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. When Larry Page and Sergey Brin were developing their search engine, “googol” was considered as a name to represent the enormous amount of information the company would organize. The story goes that a spelling variation—“Google”—ended up being registered instead. What began partly as a playful variation became one of the most recognizable names in the world.
Bluetooth
Bluetooth sounds like a particularly strange name for wireless technology. It was actually inspired by a 10th-century Danish king, Harald “Bluetooth” Gormsson, who was known for uniting parts of Scandinavia. Engineers working on the technology used “Bluetooth” as a temporary code name because the technology was intended to unite different communication systems. They eventually couldn’t come up with a better replacement, so the temporary joke became permanent. Did you know about this as one of the things that were named as jokes?
Häagen-Dazs
The name sounds Scandinavian, but it was invented in the United States by Reuben and Rose Mattus, who began selling ice cream in New York. The name was deliberately designed to sound European and prestigious. It doesn’t actually have a meaningful Danish or Scandinavian translation. The branding worked so well that generations of consumers assumed the company had authentic Scandinavian origins.
Yahoo!
When Jerry Yang and David Filo created their early web directory, they initially called it “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” They eventually changed the name to Yahoo!, inspired partly by the word used for the crude, uncivilized creatures in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. The founders also reportedly used it as an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.” A deliberately playful name ended up attached to one of the earliest major internet companies. Did you know about this as one of the things that were named as jokes?
Spam
The canned meat product SPAM received its name in 1937, but Hormel has never publicly established one definitive meaning for the word. The famous Monty Python comedy sketches later used “spam” repeatedly, eventually helping inspire the modern internet meaning of unwanted repetitive messages. In other words, a canned-food brand name became a completely different word because comedians kept saying it over and over.
Linux
The name Linux was created from Linus Torvalds’s first name combined with “Unix,” the operating system that influenced his project. Torvalds initially used the name himself, although he reportedly preferred “Freax” at first—a combination of “free,” “freak,” and his name. A colleague used the Linux name on the server where the project was hosted, and it stuck. Did you know about this as one of the things that were named as jokes?
The Pink Floyd
The band’s original name was essentially an accident of psychedelic-era creativity. Syd Barrett combined the first names of two obscure American blues musicians, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council, after noticing their records in his collection. “The Pink Floyd Sound” eventually became Pink Floyd. Two names belonging to musicians most listeners had never heard of therefore became part of one of the most famous band names in music history.
What do you think about these things that were named as jokes? Tell us what surprised you most in the comments!