Are Java and JavaScript cousins, and if they have nothing in common… why do they have such similar names? Why did Apple pick something as overused as the apple for its name and symbol? What on earth is… Adobe? Or Google? Does Lenovo have anything to do with Lenin?
“That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” says Juliet, as quoted by Shakespeare. And would what we call Apple or Amazon smell as sweet under another name?
We can only guess. But behind the names of the online world's biggest players there are sometimes funny stories. In the lines that follow, we'll run quickly through some of the most instructive and unexpected ones.
In the Name of Prose
A man lives “for honor and for a good name,” according to Rachko Pradleto, a character created by Ivan Vazov, Bulgaria's national poet. You probably haven't thought about Rachko (not Rachkov, the TV comedian) and his “good name” lately, but you certainly mention often the names whose stories we'll talk about in the lines that follow.
Our alphabet begins with a fairly well-known story, the one behind the name Apple. For a long time the company's founders wondered what to call it, until at one point, as Steve Wozniak tells it, Steve Jobs came back from a trip to a commune in Oregon that tended an apple orchard. They never came up with anything better, and in his biography Jobs says he liked the name because it was “fun, spirited and not intimidating.”
And indeed, it hasn't intimidated quite a few million users since then—quite the opposite. While we're still on the letter “A,” let's mention the neat logic behind the name Adobe. The company that looks after Photoshop, Illustrator and many other software solutions for designers and for humanity at large was named by its co-founder John Warnock after the little stream of the same name that flowed not far from his home—Adobe Creek.
What I Call Myself
Yes, names obviously often come about simply because they have to sound good, without excess baggage or negative associations. And ideas pop up from under every stone and tree.
Or in exchange for a fee. In 2001, the company Research In Motion hired a consulting firm to come up with a good enough name for a new service they were planning to launch—a little machine for sending emails, so fashionable at the time.
To these consultants, the tiny keys on the gadget looked exactly like the drupelets of a wild berry. Blackberries, say. And so, through a fresh and accurate association, BlackBerry phones were “born.” Soon the client company itself, which loved the name, renamed itself the same way.
Sometimes the search for a name is quite hard. Have you ever wondered what kind of oracle Oracle is? The project's three founders say they can't reveal the exact etymology, because it comes from a project they had worked on for the CIA just before founding the company.
Christening
Then again, it can be that simple… ChatGPT became a superstar despite a clearly not-very-marketable abbreviation that means something to only a few. Or take OpenAI, who, you could ask Elon Musk, haven't been particularly “open” for a long time.
Let's move on so we don't wander into ticklish territory. Some names are downright wacky by design, Twitter for example. As its creator Jack Dorsey tells it, the company was looking for a name that somehow sounded like the service itself. “Well, when you get a message, your phone doesn't go ‘buzzz,’ or ‘jitt,’ or ‘dinggg’—to us it sounded just like ‘tweet.’”
It's great fun to picture the entrepreneurs sitting there “buzzing,” “jitting” and “tweeting” until they hit on the best onomatopoeic solution.
Hence Twitter, the network that shares “tweets”… which never did become “X-es” after Musk applied his marketing genius with the platform's new name—X. (Or with Tesla—sure, he may try to convince us it's a tribute to the Serbian genius, but judging by some of the ideas in the models, there could easily be a connection with the tesla, the multipurpose adze-hammer so popular in Bulgaria.)
The story of TikTok is similar… Something goes “tik-tok” in there; “linguists” call it “onomatopoeia”—a word that imitates a sound, in this case the notification of a new short clip from your favorite influencer.
Pixar was named by Steve Jobs after a Spanish word for “to make pictures.”
Nothing Bigger Than Google!
Google, as you may know, came about simply to announce enormous possibilities. A googol is the largest number that arithmetic currently honors with a name of its own.
And Amazon? Supposedly at first Jeff Bezos insisted on calling it Cadabra (a pet name from “abracadabra”), but then decided the name absolutely had to start with the first letter of the alphabet, so it would always come first in any search. And then came this word, tied to the name of the Amazon River (Bezos says it inspires him because it's different, exotic and the biggest in the world). And, of course, to “amazing”—“Really cool!”
Nintendo, meanwhile, is a classic Japanese solution—the first syllable means “trusted,” and the rest “paradise.” So when we play, do we land in a “trusted paradise”?
There may not be so many TV sets anymore, but YouTube is… “your television.” Why that is, and how the biggest video platform was supposed to be a dating site—read here.
Entered in the Yearbook
And what's this Skype, and does it have anything to do with the heavens? Yes, definitely. At first they called it Skyper because of what it offered—“Sky peer to peer,” “the sky from user to user.” A metaphor meant to say that communication without a server in the middle between users was now possible, communication that could take off into the clouds.
Viber doesn't come from the phone vibrating, but from the idea that when two people talk, they vibrate on the same frequency. WhatsApp, of course, is a play on the colloquial English “What's up?” and the abbreviation for application.
While we're on ways to communicate… Telegram seems pretty obvious—Pavel Durov takes us back to the days when we dictated messages at the post office so they'd reach our friends in the next town… Curiously, that's also where Instagram comes from—an “instant telegram.” I wonder how many of the people who use them today have ever even seen a telegram?
Facebook is pretty dull too; in Bulgarian we'd call it a “face-book.” In fact, Mark Zuckerberg named his project, meant to connect with fellow students, after the word used for the student directories at Harvard and other renowned universities. Still, it's endearing that he kept the name after his little project turned into a mega-venture that swallowed the whole world.
The same goes for WordPress. Its creator Matt Mullenweg was looking for something memorable and understandable enough, nothing more (and yet more than enough—read here).
The Name List of the Bulgarian Khans
In Bulgarian, the combination of the two words that make up Microsoft—“micro” and “soft”—doesn't sound good at all; you've surely heard the jokes about Bill Gates's possible physical attributes. Actually, the name was suggested by Paul Allen and comes from… “microprocessor” and “software.” Other interpretations we leave to you.
The logic behind Intel is similarly dull—“integrated electronics.”
And Lenovo? Does it come from Lenin, or from laziness, леност (lenost)? Not exactly—the etymology leads to “legend.” In 2002 that word occurred to the project's boss, Yang Yuanqing, who even began using it actively. Soon, however, he saw there were already quite a few ventures with the same name. So he decided to combine the beginning—“le” from “legend”—with “novo,” which in Latin means “new.” The marketing for the transition from Legend to Lenovo cost 32 million dollars.
It Has a Name
Sony also comes from a Latin word, “sonus”—“sound.” Easy to pronounce for people from different cultures.
Since “novo” means “new,” does Sega come from the Bulgarian сега (sega, “now”)? Not at all—it's an abbreviation of “Service Games of Japan.”
The story of how Linux got the name of its rather modest creator, Linus Torvalds, is quite funny. His other “offspring”—git—has an instructive name too, but you can find more about where they came from here.
eBay—created by Pierre Omidyar, the popular online store, which started out more as an auction site, took the name of the consulting company its founder ran. It was called Echo Bay, but alas, it turned out that the domain of the same name was taken and something different had to be invented. Omidyar decided simply to shorten it.
And the competition—does Alibaba necessarily come with the 40 thieves? Jack Ma was sitting in a café in San Francisco when it occurred to him that this was quite a popular name, and he decided to check. He asked the waitress what it made her think of, and she replied: “Open Sesame!” So he concluded that this was one of the few names known all over the world, across cultures. (Speaking of which, that sounds a bit like… Shazam, open up, doesn't it?)
Yahooo!
Sometimes it's downright banal. The question-and-answer forum Quora comes from… questions & answers. The global networking-equipment giant Cisco, as you can tell from a mile away, carries the name of San Francisco, the city it comes from.
Yahoo! sounds like an enthusiastic whoop, and that's exactly what it is. The founders of Google's onetime rival as the world's search engine were looking for a cry that sounded loud, unbridled and rude.
In Bulgarian, ксерокс (kseroks) is more than a brand—it's simply the word for a machine that copies pages. The real Xerox gets its name from the technology of “xerography,” which in turn comes from the Greek words for “dry” and “write.”
This section is for polyglots. Samsung in Korean means “three stars.” Nokia owes its name to the Finnish river Nokianvirta. Wikipedia combines the universal “encyclopedia” with the Hawaiian word for quick, and the story is definitely interesting.
Before we part, it's time for one more interesting group of names—those of programming languages.
Alphabet Soup
First let's tick off the most common case—languages that house abbreviations in their names. Here we find some of the most characteristic solutions from the past, when people apparently weren't so keen on marketing and the main task was for the name to explain the language. BASIC is short for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. Roughly speaking—“symbolic instruction code for beginners with many uses.” Another revolutionary language, COBOL, is an acronym for COmmon Business Oriented Language—“a general, business-oriented language.”
FORTRAN comes from FORmula TRANslator, and LISP is purely and simply… LISt Processor.
Go, which has made waves in recent years, simply carries the first letters of its creator's name—Google. A rather unusual lack of imagination for that company…
In more recent times, among the most-used languages “named” after abbreviations are SQL—Structured Query Language—and PHP. For the latter you may come across the claim that the abbreviation stands for Personal Home Page, but these days it's more a matter of Hypertext Preprocessor.
Named After Grandpa
Quite a few languages got their names in honor of a person. The most popular example is Ada, named after Ada Lovelace. Lord Byron's daughter was one of the pioneers of computer science, long before computers even existed. Languages have been named after Euler, Turing and other mathematicians and programmers. And not only them—others bear the names of figures like Mozart, Occam, Eiffel, even Orwell.
Among the more popular are Pascal, revolutionary for the 1970s, named in memory of the French mathematician Blaise Pascal, and Haskell, bearing the name of one of the pioneers of programming—Haskell Curry.
From the world of mythology and literature come Delphi, Oberon, Oz and Alice.
C, Is That You?
Today's most popular programming languages have a common ancestor—C. Later some of its descendants kept the letter and added to it so you'd feel the difference (C++, C# or Objective-C). There's even a language called C--.
But where does the name of C, so important to computers today, come from? It's a bit banal. Its creators simply considered it the successor to a systems language called B. Which in turn was a simplified version of the language BCPL, to which it owes its name… As you can see, programming languages have rather complicated family ties here, which could definitely rival the plot of a telenovela.
And if we continue with inherited names, it's worth mentioning Ruby, which was simply inspired by Perl. Except that the ancestor has a letter “eaten” from “pearl,” to make it sound fresher…
No Questions Asked, Python
Programmers really are a bit banal, you might say after the examples above. For the finale I've saved a few examples that show the opposite—a sense of humor among the creators of programming languages, skillful in some places, less so in others.
Wondering what kind of python stands behind the name of the most popular language associated with developing artificial intelligence—Python? It's not actually the snake at all. It's “Monty Python”—the language's creators were fans of British comedy.
We've already talked about JavaScript, which got its name at the last moment for purely marketing purposes—so it could ride on the shoulders of the fame of its “half-namesake,” Java. And rather cheekily, since the two were projects by completely different creators, who apparently just weren't very careful about protecting their copyright.
Java from Java
And looking back up the chain… what is Java? At first the language was supposed to be called Oak. But something about it “grated” on the creators (and just as well—in Bulgarian it doesn't sound charming either, you'll have to take my word for it). So they sat down and chatted about a name that would sound cool to them, without necessarily carrying some deep meaning. So the language became Green. That, they decided, was too plain.
So they settled on Java. Programmers drink quite a lot of coffee, you know? That was fully true of this team, which happened to prefer Java coffee, named after the Indonesian island. The rest is history (and free advertising for that kind of coffee and for Indonesia as a tourist destination).
And so, we've been through quite a few stories… Which show that a name may not matter, but it can also pave the way for a venture. Did I miss something important? Which of the stories did you find most interesting? I'd be glad to hear any interesting opinions…
