Television's highest award is named after a piece of camera hardware. The name began as shop talk among engineers.
The Television Academy says its statuette was designed by television engineer Louis McManus, who used his wife as the model. Academy members chose his design in 1948 after turning down 47 other proposals. It shows a winged woman holding an atom. According to the Academy, the wings stand for the muse of art and the atom for science.
The statue needed a name, and the first suggestion was also technical. Academy founder Syd Cassyd proposed "Ike," the nickname of the iconoscope tube. Members turned it down because Ike already meant Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Harry Lubcke, a pioneer television engineer and the Academy's third president, came up with the winner. He suggested "Immy," a term for the image orthicon, an early camera tube. According to the Academy, the name was then changed to Emmy, which members thought "more appropriate for a female symbol."
Etymonline records the award as first given in 1949 and calls Emmy "said to be an alteration of Immy," from image. The AV Club, citing Oxford Dictionaries, gives the same chain: Emmy from Immy, and Immy from image orthicon. Etymonline hedges with "said to be," but none of these sources offers a rival explanation.
The name set a pattern. Etymonline says the Grammy, which it dates to 1959, took gram- from gramophone and was formed on the model of Emmy. So a nickname for a camera tube ended up shaping the name of the music industry's top prize too.
The word image behind it all is old. Etymonline traces it to Old French and Latin imaginem, used in English around 1200 for a statue or likeness. That makes the name oddly fitting: the award is, after all, a small statue of a woman.