Brand names
How companies and products got their names: founders' surnames, invented words, mergers, trademarks, and a few names chosen almost at random.
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- Adidas
Adidas is a contraction of its founder's name: Adolf "Adi" Dassler. His older brother Rudolf was his business partner for over two decades at their shared shoe factory in Herzogenaurach, Germany — until a bitter falling-out in the late 1940s split the company…
From the Tue, Aug 4, 2026 roundup → - Adobe
Adobe Systems has nothing to do with sun-dried mud bricks. Cofounder John Warnock started the company out of his home in Los Altos, California, and named it after Adobe Creek, the small stream that happened to run behind his house. "Adobe" the software giant…
From the Sat, Sep 12, 2026 roundup → - Airstream
Wally Byam unveiled the sleek, riveted, all-aluminum travel trailer that made his company famous in 1936. He named the brand for the way its rounded shape was said to glide down the highway like a current of air, cutting wind resistance instead of fighting it…
From the Wed, Sep 2, 2026 roundup → - Apple
Steve Jobs reportedly landed on "Apple" shortly after returning from a stint at an apple orchard, deciding the name sounded "fun, spirited, and not intimidating." A more practical motive, per Jobs's own account, was alphabetical: it would land ahead of Atari…
From the Tue, Aug 25, 2026 roundup → - Aspirin
When Bayer brought its pain reliever to market in 1899, the company built the brand name "aspirin" out of its own chemistry: "a" for acetyl, "spir" for Spiraea, the meadowsweet plant whose extract yields a related compound, and "-in," a generic suffix common…
From the Fri, Aug 28, 2026 roundup → - Atari
Before it was a video game company, "atari" was — and still is — a term from the board game Go, called out when a stone or group of stones is one move from being captured, roughly the Go equivalent of "check" in chess. Nolan Bushnell, an avid Go player…
From the Wed, Aug 5, 2026 roundup → - Audi
Audi exists because its founder, August Horch, got sued over his own name. After a falling-out with his first company (which, confusingly, was also called Horch), a court ruled he could no longer use "Horch" for a new car brand — even though it was literally…
From the Tue, Aug 4, 2026 roundup → - Automat
The waiterless "Automat", rows of little glass-fronted compartments you could unlock with a coin, wasn't an American invention. Berlin businessman Max Sielaff patented the vending system first; Philadelphia's Horn & Hardart just imported it, opening the first…
From the Tue, Sep 8, 2026 roundup → - Bluetooth
Harald Gormsson, who ruled Denmark and Norway in the 10th century, picked up the nickname Bluetooth according to a 12th-century chronicle, apparently for a conspicuously dark or damaged tooth, and is remembered for uniting warring Danish tribes and…
From the Sat, Sep 19, 2026 roundup → - Disneyland
When "Disneyland" opened in Anaheim, California on July 17, 1955, it was designed around a single unifying story and carefully controlled atmosphere, divided into themed "lands," rather than just being a loose collection of unrelated rides — the reason it's…
From the Mon, Aug 31, 2026 roundup → - Edsel
Ford poured years of market research and more than 8,000 candidate names into its new 1958 car line, and Edsel Ford's own sons objected when executives settled on naming it after their father anyway. The car flopped so badly that "Edsel" is still shorthand…
From the Mon, Sep 14, 2026 roundup → - Epson
Before it was Epson, the company was Shinshu Seiki, a Seiko subsidiary that built the EP-101 in 1968 — the world's first electronic mini-printer, developed out of timing equipment Seiko made for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. In 1975, the company branded its next…
From the Mon, Aug 3, 2026 roundup → - Escalator
The name "escalator" was trademarked around 1900, blending "elevator" with roots relating to climbing, and licensed to Otis Elevator Company, which installed the first public escalator at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Otis used the trademarked name so casually…
From the Sun, Aug 30, 2026 roundup → - Foot Locker
Long before it was a shoe store, a "foot locker" was a small, lockable wooden trunk kept at the base of a soldier's bunk, standard issue in military barracks by World War Two for storing uniforms and personal effects. The retail chain borrowed the name more…
From the Mon, Sep 7, 2026 roundup → - Frisbee
Yale students in the late 1800s used to toss around empty pie tins from the nearby Frisbie Baking Company, yelling "Frisbie!" as a warning to anyone in the way. Fred Morrison spent decades independently developing a plastic flying disc of his own, and when he…
From the Mon, Sep 7, 2026 roundup → - Google
Larry Page and Sergey Brin were brainstorming names in a Stanford office in September 1997 when fellow grad student Sean Anderson suggested "googolplex," after the enormous number. Page liked the shorter "googol," a 1 followed by 100 zeros, and Anderson went…
From the Tue, Sep 15, 2026 roundup → - Gucci
As a teenager in the 1890s, Guccio Gucci left Florence for London, where he worked as a porter at the Savoy Hotel, hauling the trunks and cases of wealthy guests and absorbing an education in what elegant luggage was supposed to look like. He returned home…
From the Sat, Sep 19, 2026 roundup → - Holiday Inn
Kemmons Wilson came home from a miserable 1951 family road trip to Washington, D.C., convinced America needed clean, predictable motels where kids stayed free. As his architect, Eddie Bluestein, drew up plans for the first one on Summer Avenue in Memphis, he…
From the Mon, Sep 21, 2026 roundup → - Instagram
Founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger built "Instagram" by blending "instant camera" with "telegram," aiming to capture both the instant-photo nostalgia of Polaroids and the idea of quickly sending that photo somewhere else — like a visual telegraph message…
From the Mon, Aug 24, 2026 roundup → - iPod
Apple's iPod got its name from Vinnie Chieco, a freelance copywriter brought in for the 2001 launch, who pitched "pod" because the device's white, sealed-shell design and tiny screen reminded him of the sleep pods and shuttle-bay pod doors in 2001: A Space…
From the Sun, Aug 23, 2026 roundup → - Kevlar
DuPont chemist Stephanie Kwolek was searching for a lightweight fiber to reinforce car tires in 1965 when she discovered a liquid crystalline polymer solution that spun into a fiber far stronger than anything the lab had made before — about five times…
From the Thu, Sep 3, 2026 roundup → - Kit Kat
Rowntree's launched the bar in 1935 as "Chocolate Crisp," renaming it "Kit Kat Chocolate Crisp" in 1937 before shortening it to just Kit Kat after World War II. The name itself is older than the candy by over two centuries: the Kit-Cat Club was an early-1700s…
From the Sun, Aug 9, 2026 roundup → - Lego
Danish carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen coined "Lego" in 1934 by mashing together leg godt, Danish for "play well." He almost certainly didn't know at the time that "lego" also happens to mean "I put together" or "I assemble" in Latin — a coincidence so…
From the Sun, Aug 23, 2026 roundup → - Levi's
On May 20, 1873, San Francisco dry-goods merchant Levi Strauss and Reno tailor Jacob Davis received a joint patent for reinforcing work pants with copper rivets at stress points — an idea Davis had come up with after noticing spare rivets lying around his…
From the Sun, Aug 30, 2026 roundup → - Life Savers
In 1912, Cleveland candy maker Clarence Crane — father of the poet Hart Crane — was looking for a mint that could survive summer heat better than chocolate. He borrowed a pharmacist's pill-press machine to shape them, and the machine kept punching an unwanted…
From the Tue, Sep 1, 2026 roundup → - Lincoln Logs
Lincoln Logs were invented around 1916–1917 by John Lloyd Wright, the second son of architect Frank Lloyd Wright — and the inspiration came from the family business. While helping his father oversee construction of Tokyo's Imperial Hotel, John studied the…
From the Fri, Aug 7, 2026 roundup → - Lycra
DuPont chemists coined "Lycra" in the late 1950s as a completely invented word with no etymological meaning at all — the company had a long habit of generating brand-new, easy-to-pronounce, trademark-friendly names (see also: nylon, Teflon) rather than…
From the Mon, Aug 24, 2026 roundup → - Mastercard
In 1966, a group of banks that had been shut out of Bank of America's BankAmericard program formed the Interbank Card Association to fight back. The name on the plastic came together in 1969: "Master Charge" was borrowed from a card run by the First National…
From the Fri, Sep 25, 2026 roundup → - Maybelline
Thomas Lyle Williams, a young Chicago entrepreneur, watched his sister Mabel darken her eyelashes with a homemade mix of petroleum jelly and coal dust, and in 1915 started selling a version by mail order under the name "Lash-Brow-Ine." When that ran into…
From the Wed, Sep 16, 2026 roundup → - Milk Duds
Milk Duds were invented in Chicago in 1928 by Edwin Holloway of F. Hoffman & Co., who set out to make a perfectly round chocolate-covered caramel. He couldn't do it — the shape kept coming out lopsided — so instead of hiding the flaw, he named the candy after…
From the Tue, Aug 4, 2026 roundup → - Nabisco
"Nabisco" started life in 1898 as an informal shorthand for the company's much longer original name, and stuck around as a popular nickname for decades before the company finally made it official. The syllable-by-syllable abbreviation had already won in…
From the Sat, Sep 12, 2026 roundup → - New Balance
William J. Riley, an Irish immigrant in Boston, founded the "New Balance" Arch Support Company in 1906 to make flexible inserts for people who stood all day. Company lore holds that he designed the three-point support after watching chickens in his yard…
From the Wed, Sep 23, 2026 roundup → - Nike
Long before it was stitched onto sneakers, "Nike" was simply the Greek word for victory, personified as a winged goddess who accompanied warriors and athletes alike. An employee reportedly suggested the name to the company's founders in 1971, and the swoosh…
From the Thu, Sep 10, 2026 roundup → - Nikon
Long before it made a camera, Nikon was an optical-instruments company. The name blends the Japanese words for "Japan" and "optical," reflecting the firm's original business making lenses and binoculars. "Nikon" wouldn't release its first camera for decades…
From the Sun, Sep 13, 2026 roundup → - Nintendo
Fusajiro Yamauchi founded "Nintendo" in Kyoto in 1889 to make hanafuda, the hand-painted Japanese flower playing cards. The name is usually translated as "leave luck to heaven," though exactly what the founder intended by it is not documented. The company…
From the Tue, Sep 15, 2026 roundup → - Novocaine
German chemist Alfred Einhorn patented this local anesthetic in 1905 and gave it a trademarked name built from Latin novus, "new," plus a suffix borrowed from an entirely different, illicit numbing drug already familiar to chemists of the era. "Novocaine"…
From the Wed, Sep 2, 2026 roundup → - Nylon
The tidy story about "nylon" — that it blends "New York" and "London" from an intercontinental flight where two DuPont chemists dreamed up the name — is a myth that only started circulating after the fiber hit the market in 1939. Company records tell a much…
From the Tue, Sep 1, 2026 roundup → - Oracle
Before it was a database giant, Oracle was the codename of a classified 1977 CIA project that founders Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates worked on together at a previous company. The project's goal was ambitious even by today's standards: build a system…
From the Tue, Aug 11, 2026 roundup → - Oreo
Nobody, including Nabisco, has ever definitively settled where Oreo got its name. Leading theories point to the French word "or" for gold, echoing the cookie's original gold-embossed packaging, or the Greek "oros" for mountain, describing an early hill-shaped…
From the Wed, Sep 9, 2026 roundup → - Ouija
The talking board trademarked as "Ouija" in 1890 supposedly named itself: according to company lore, its makers held a séance and asked the board directly what it wanted to be called, and it spelled out O-U-I-J-A. A popular (and much repeated) explanation…
From the Fri, Aug 28, 2026 roundup → - Ping-Pong
The English games firm J. Jaques & Son trademarked "Ping-Pong" in 1901, naming their boxed parlor set for the sound of a celluloid ball on a vellum bat, and later sold the American rights to Parker Brothers. Because the name belonged to a company, everyone…
From the Mon, Sep 21, 2026 roundup → - Pixar
Before it made a single movie, Pixar sold expensive image-processing computers, and its name reportedly reflects that: a blend of "pixel," the smallest unit of a digital image, with a tech-sounding "-ar" ending echoing words like "radar" or "sonar." The…
From the Sun, Aug 23, 2026 roundup → - Reebok
British brothers Joe and Jeff Foster named their athletic shoe company "Reebok" in 1958 after the rhebok, a small, notably fast African antelope — "Reebok" being simply the English spelling of the Afrikaans word for the animal. The name was meant to suggest…
From the Sun, Aug 23, 2026 roundup → - Roku
Roku is Japanese for "six" — because it was founder Anthony Wood's sixth company. As Wood tells it, he was at a Japanese restaurant in Palo Alto trying to name his new streaming venture, and asked the waitress for the Japanese word for "five" first (his…
From the Thu, Aug 6, 2026 roundup → - Rolex
According to founder Hans Wilsdorf's own account, given in a 1958 speech, the name Rolex came to him as a word whispered in his ear by a genie while he rode a horse-drawn omnibus through Cheapside, London, sometime around 1908. It's a wonderful story and…
From the Sun, Aug 9, 2026 roundup → - Rubik's Cube
Ernő Rubik was a Hungarian architecture professor, not a toymaker, when he built his first working model in 1974. He wasn't trying to invent a puzzle at all: he was trying to solve a structural engineering problem, how to let many small independent pieces…
From the Fri, Sep 4, 2026 roundup → - Scrabble
The tile game most people know as Scrabble has had two other names in its lifetime. Architect Alfred Mosher Butts first built it as a refinement of an earlier game of his own, Lexiko, then reworked it into a crossword-style version he called Criss-Crosswords…
From the Sun, Sep 13, 2026 roundup → - Slinky
Naval engineer Richard James was trying to design springs that could keep sensitive shipboard instruments steady at sea in 1943 when he accidentally knocked a sample off a shelf — and watched, startled, as it calmly "walked" down instead of just falling. His…
From the Thu, Sep 3, 2026 roundup → - Spam
Hormel introduced its canned pork product on July 5, 1937, and got the name from a contest: the winner was Ken Daigneau, a New York actor who happened to be the brother of a Hormel vice president, and he collected $100 for it. The company's official line is…
From the Wed, Sep 16, 2026 roundup → - Starbucks
In 1971, the founders sat down with artist Terry Heckler to name their new Seattle coffee company, wanting something with a sense of Pacific Northwest adventure and old maritime coffee-trading roots. Heckler pushed for names starting with "st," and somewhere…
From the Fri, Aug 7, 2026 roundup → - Stetson
In 1865, hatmaker John B. Stetson — who'd headed to the Colorado frontier hoping the dry air would help his health — noticed that nothing on the market actually suited the punishing conditions cowboys worked in, so he designed a wide-brimmed, waterproof felt…
From the Sun, Aug 30, 2026 roundup → - Subway
Seventeen-year-old Fred DeLuca opened his first sandwich shop in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1965 with a loan from family friend Peter Buck, calling it Pete's Super Submarines. Radio ads were the problem: announcers saying "Pete's Submarines" over the air…
From the Sat, Sep 19, 2026 roundup → - Tabasco
Edmund McIlhenny started selling his pepper sauce in 1868 from Avery Island, a salt dome in the Louisiana bayou, and with glass scarce after the Civil War he bottled the first batches in discarded cologne bottles with sprinkler tops, which is why "Tabasco"…
From the Thu, Sep 17, 2026 roundup → - Tabloid
Burroughs, Wellcome & Company registered "Tabloid" as a trademark on March 14, 1884, for its compressed medicine tablets, and defended it fiercely. The press caught the word anyway: on January 1, 1901, Alfred Harmsworth produced a one-day experimental edition…
From the Sun, Sep 27, 2026 roundup → - Tarmac
"Tarmac" is a blend of "tar" and "macadam," and macadam itself is an eponym: it's named for John Loudon McAdam, the Scottish engineer who pioneered building roads from layers of compacted crushed stone in the early 1800s. Decades later, Welsh surveyor Edgar…
From the Sat, Aug 22, 2026 roundup → - Taser
The TASER is named after a boys' adventure novel. Inventor Jack Cover, a former NASA researcher, based his 1970s design partly on the fictional weapon in the 1911 novel Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle and wanted to name his device after it — but "TSER"…
From the Wed, Aug 12, 2026 roundup → - Teflon
On April 6, 1938, DuPont chemist Roy Plunkett was working on new refrigerants and went to draw some tetrafluoroethylene gas from a cylinder he'd stored on dry ice. Nothing came out. The cylinder, though, weighed just as much as when it was full, so Plunkett…
From the Tue, Sep 15, 2026 roundup → - Tetris
Soviet programmer Alexey Pajitnov built "Tetris" in 1984 on a government computer in Moscow, naming it by combining the Greek prefix tetra- ("four," since every falling piece is made of four squares) with "tennis," reportedly his favorite sport. Untangling…
From the Sun, Aug 23, 2026 roundup → - Tommy Hilfiger
In 1985, with almost every dollar he could raise, a largely unknown Tommy Hilfiger bought a massive Times Square billboard listing "the 4 Great American Designers for Men": Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Perry Ellis — and Hilfiger himself, a man virtually nobody…
From the Thu, Aug 13, 2026 roundup → - Trampoline
American gymnast George Nissen built his first bouncing apparatus out of canvas and inner-tube rubber in 1934, inspired by watching circus acrobats rebound off safety nets. He patented it as a "Tumbling Device," but the catchier name came later, borrowed from…
From the Fri, Aug 14, 2026 roundup → - Tumi
Founder Charlie Clifford named his 1975 luggage company after a figure from Peruvian Pre-Columbian iconography, encountered during his two years in Peru as part of an experimental Peace Corps MBA program. Tumi is more precisely the name of a ceremonial Andean…
From the Thu, Aug 6, 2026 roundup → - Tupperware
Earl Tupper, a former DuPont chemist, took a black, foul-smelling refinery byproduct called polyethylene slag and purified it into a clean, flexible plastic, then designed a lid whose airtight seal he modeled on a paint can's. "Tupperware" launched in 1946…
From the Tue, Sep 22, 2026 roundup → - Uber
Uber's name comes straight from the German word for "above" or "over," chosen specifically to suggest something premium and superior compared to an ordinary taxi. The company's actual German-language branding has occasionally had to work around the fact that…
From the Fri, Sep 11, 2026 roundup → - Ugg boots
Sheepskin boots have been worn informally by Australian surfers and shearers since at least the 1930s, under a name whose own origin nobody wrote down at the time, though the leading guess is that it is simply short for "ugly." A handful of small Australian…
From the Fri, Sep 18, 2026 roundup → - Under Armour
Kevin Plank, a special-teams captain on the University of Maryland football team in the mid-1990s, was tired of soaking through the cotton T-shirts he wore under his pads at every practice, and started experimenting with the moisture-wicking synthetic fabrics…
From the Sun, Sep 20, 2026 roundup → - Vaseline
Robert Chesebrough, an English chemist working the Pennsylvania oil fields in the 1870s, noticed rig workers using a waxy residue that gummed up their pumps to heal cuts and burns. He patented a purified version in 1878 and named it by mashing together the…
From the Sat, Sep 12, 2026 roundup → - Velcro
Swiss engineer George de Mestral got the idea for "Velcro" after picking burrs off his dog's fur — and his own trousers — following a hike in the Alps in the 1940s, and spent years figuring out how to manufacture a fabric version of the tiny hooks he saw…
From the Mon, Aug 24, 2026 roundup → - Volkswagen
Volkswagen is simply German for "people's car," and the company was founded in 1937 under the Nazi "Strength Through Joy" program to build one. But the very first cars off the line weren't badged "Volkswagen" at all. Hitler declared they'd be called the…
From the Sat, Sep 12, 2026 roundup → - Walkman
When Sony's portable cassette player launched in 1979, it didn't have one name — it had four. Japan got the brand name that eventually went global; the US got "Sound-About"; the UK got "Stowaway"; Sweden got "Freestyle." Co-founder Akio Morita reportedly…
From the Wed, Aug 26, 2026 roundup → - Wikipedia
Ward Cunningham launched the first wiki website in March 1995 and named it after the Wiki Wiki Shuttle, the bus that a counter agent at Honolulu International Airport had once told him to take between terminals; "wiki" is Hawaiian for "quick." When Jimmy…
From the Thu, Sep 17, 2026 roundup → - Yahoo
Long before it was a search engine, a "Yahoo" was a fictional race of crude, brutish humanoids in the fourth part of Jonathan Swift's 1726 novel Gulliver's Travels, kept as filthy livestock by a civilization of intelligent horses. A pair of Stanford graduate…
From the Fri, Sep 4, 2026 roundup → - Yahtzee
According to game-industry lore, a wealthy Canadian couple invented a dice game in 1954 to play with friends aboard their yacht — hence its earliest nickname, "the Yacht Game." Two years later they asked a toy entrepreneur to make a batch of sets as gifts; he…
From the Mon, Aug 31, 2026 roundup → - YETI
Roy and Ryan Seiders, two Texan brothers frustrated by coolers that couldn't survive a real fishing trip, founded YETI in 2006 and picked the name for the same reason most outdoor brands chase mythical-beast branding: they wanted something that read as…
From the Tue, Aug 11, 2026 roundup → - Yo-yo
The yo-yo as a toy has ancient roots stretching back to Greece and China, but its modern name and its American popularity both trace to the Philippines. Pedro Flores, a Filipino immigrant, began manufacturing and marketing the toy in California in the late…
From the Tue, Aug 18, 2026 roundup → - Zamboni
In 1949, Southern California ice-rink owner Frank Zamboni got tired of watching a five-person crew spend ninety minutes scraping, sweeping, washing, and re-flooding his rink's surface by hand between sessions. He built a single machine — cobbled together…
From the Wed, Aug 26, 2026 roundup →