TouchéGet the appWhy is it called Bluetooth? 12 brand names with odd backstories
Most brand names started as somebody’s joke, somebody’s dad, or a word that sounded right in a meeting. Here are twelve from the Touché question bank. Try guessing each one before you read on.
Bluetooth
Bluetooth is named after what? A Viking king. The logo is his initials, H and B, written in Viking runes.
LEGO
The name Lego comes from Danish words meaning what? Play well. Lego was named before it made a single brick. Carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen began making wooden toys in Billund, Denmark, in 1932 and called the company Lego in 1934, from “leg godt.” Plastic toys followed in 1947 and the first interlocking bricks in 1949.
Reebok
Reebok is named after what African animal? Antelope. The founders found the name in a prize dictionary. Joe Foster won it in a sprint race as a boy, and in 1958 he and his brother Jeff used it for their new company. Reebok is Afrikaans for the gray rhebok, a type of African antelope.
M&M’s
What do the two Ms in M&M’s stand for? Mars and Murrie. Forrest Mars and Bruce Murrie, the two men who started it in 1941.
Pepsi
What was Pepsi originally called? Brad’s Drink. Pharmacist Caleb Bradham named it after himself in 1893.
Häagen-Dazs
Häagen-Dazs is a made-up name meant to sound like which language? Danish. Founder Reuben Mattus settled on the nonsense name in 1959 to sound Danish, as a tribute to Denmark’s treatment of Jews in World War II. It means nothing in Danish or any other language.
Sony
The ‘sonny’ in Sony’s name was 1950s slang for what? A young boy. The founders blended the Latin ‘sonus’, meaning sound, with ‘sonny’, a common slang term in 1950s America for a young boy. In Japan ‘sonny boys’ suggested bright, smart young men, which suited them.
Wi-Fi
Wi-Fi’s name was chosen to sound like which audio term? Hi-Fi. Before it had a name, Wi-Fi was “IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence.” The Wi-Fi Alliance hired the branding firm Interbrand for something catchier, and Interbrand proposed ten names. Wi-Fi won partly because it sounded like Hi-Fi, which people take to mean high quality.
Google began in 1996 as a Stanford project called what? BackRub. BackRub set out to find which web pages link to a given page. Larry Page and Sergey Brin later renamed it Google, a misspelling of googol, the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. The first version, released in August 1996, used nearly half of Stanford’s network bandwidth.
Samsung
What does the name Samsung mean in Korean? Three stars. Samsung started in 1938 as a small trading company in Korea that sold dried fish, groceries and noodles. Its founder said the name means “three stars,” with three standing for something big and powerful and stars for something everlasting.
Subaru
Subaru is the Japanese name for which star cluster? The Pleiades. Subaru’s logo shows six stars because tradition says one of the Pleiades’ Seven Sisters is invisible. The stars also allude to the companies that merged to form its parent, Fuji Heavy Industries.
Mercedes
Who was the Mercedes car brand named after? A dealer’s daughter. Emil Jellinek, Austria-Hungary’s consul in Nice, raced under the name Monsieur Mercédès and promised to buy 36 cars if Wilhelm Maybach would design a great race car. The 1901 result, the Mercedes 35 hp, was named for his daughter Mercédès.
There are 278 Everyday Life questions like these in the app.