HOW BIG COMPANIES GOT THEIR NAME Here are some interesting stories about how big companies

got their names.This list is placed in alphabetical order

Adobe Systems got their name from a small creek, called an adobe, that ran through Charles Geschke's yard, he was the Adobe co founder, along with John Warnock.

Accenture from "Accent on the future". The name Accenture was proposed by a company employee in Norway as part of an internal name finding process (BrandStorming). Before 1 January 2001, the company was called Andersen Consulting.

Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos renamed the company Amazon (from the earlier name of Cadabra.com) after the world's most voluminous river, the Amazon. He saw the potential for a larger volume of sales in an online

The company name was taken from its founder Adolf (Adi) Dassler whose first name was shortened to the nickname Adi. Together with the first three letters of his surname it formed ADIDAS.

Apple For the favorite fruit of co-founder Steve Jobs and/or for the time he worked at an apple orchard, and to distance itself from the cold, unapproachable, complicated imagery created by other computer companies at the time which had names such as IBM, DEC, and Cincom

Cisco short for San Francisco. It has also been suggested that it was CIS-co Computer Information Services was the department at Stanford University that the founders worked in.

Coca-Cola derived from the coca leaves and kola nuts used as flavoring. Coca-Cola creator John S. Pemberton changed the 'K' of kola to 'C' to make the name look better.

When Canon was founded in 1933 under the name Precision Optical Instruments Laboratory. Two years later they adopted "Canon" after the company's first camera, the Kwanon. Kwanon is the Japanese name of the Buddhist bodhisattva of mercy.

DHL named after its founders, Adrian Dalsey, Larry Hillblom, and Robert Lynn.

eBay Pierre Omidyar, who had created the Auction Web trading website, had formed a web consulting concern called Echo Bay Technology Group. "Echo Bay" did not refer to the town in Nevada, "It just sounded cool", Omidyar reportedly said. Echo Bay Mines Limited, a gold mining company, had already taken EchoBay.com, so Omidyar registered what (at the time) he thought was the second best name: eBay.com.

FIAT FabbricaItaliana AutomobiliTorino (Italian Factory ofCars of Turin).

The name started as a jockey boast about the amount of information the search-engine would be able to search. It was originally named 'Googol', a word for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. After founders - Stanford graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page presented their project to an angel investor, they received a cheque made out to 'Google

Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or PackardHewlett.

Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing email via the web from a computer anywhere in the world. When Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of names ending in 'mail' and finally settled for Hotmail as it included the letters "html" - the programming language used to write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casings.

IBM named by Tom (Thomas John) Watson Sr, an ex-employee of National Cash Register (NCR Corporation). To one-up them in all respects, he called his company InternationalBusiness M achines.

Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company 'Moore Noyce' but that was already trademarked by a hotel chain, so they had to settle for an acronym of

INTegratedELectronics.

Lego combination of the Danish "leg godt", which means to "play well".[46] Lego also means "I put together" in Latin, but Lego Group claims this is only a coincidence and the etymology of the word is entirely Danish. Years before the little plastic brick was invented, Lego manufactured wooden toys.

Founder Paul Galvin came up with this name when his company started manufacturing radios for cars. The popular radio company at the time was called Victrola.

It was coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was devoted to MICROcomputerSOFTware. Originally christened Micro-Soft, the '-' was removed later on.

Nokia started as a wood-pulp mill, the company expanded into producing rubber products in the Finnish city of Nokia. The company later adopted the city's name.

Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consulting project for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The code name for the project was called Oracle (the CIA saw this as the system to give answers to all questions or something such).

Pepsi named from the digestive enzyme pepsin.

Qantas , Queensland

And Northern Territory Aerial Services.

Reebok is simply an alternate spelling of "rhebok," an African antelope. The company founders found the word in a South African edition of a dictionary won by the Joe Foster, son of the Reebok founder J.W. Foster.

SAP SystemAnalyse und Programmentwicklung (German for "System analysis and program development"), a company formed by five ex-IBM employees who used to work in the 'Systems/Applications/Projects' group of IBM. Later, SAP was redefined to stand for Systeme, Anwendungen und Produkte in der Datenverarbeitung (Systems, Processing).

Applications and Products in Data

Sony from the Latin word 'sonus' meaning sound, and 'sonny' a slang word used by Americans to refer to a bright youngster, "since we were sonny boys working in sound and vision", said Akio Morita. The company was founded as Tokyo Tsoshiu Kogyo KK (Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation) in 1946, and changed its name to Sony in 1958. Sony was chosen as it could be pronounced easily in many languages.

Skype the original concept for the name was Sky-Peer-to-Peer, which morphed into Skyper, then Skype.

Sun Microsystems its founders designed their first workstation in their dorm at Stanford University, and chose the name Stanford

University Network for their product, hoping to sell it to the college.

They did

The name Twitter was picked out of a hat. A small group of employees from Odeo, the San Francisco podcasting startup where Twitter initially began, had a brainstorming session. They were trying to come up with names that fit with the theme of a mobile phone buzzing in your pocket with an update.After narrowing down the options (which included Jitter and Twitter), they wrote them down, put them in a hat, and let fate decide. Fate decided on Twitter

Suggested to the founder Richard Bronson by a friend who claimed they were complete virgins at business

Verizon is a combination of the words veritas, which is Latin for "truth," and horizon.

Volkswagen literally means "people's car." Adolf Hitler initially came up with the idea for "cars for the masses," which would be a statesponsored "Volkswagen" program. Hitler wanted to create a more affordable car that was able to transport two adults and three children at speeds of 62 mph. He choose the car manufacturer Porsche to carry out the project, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Vodafone from Voice, Data, Telefone. Vodafone made the UK's first mobile call at a few minutes past midnight on 1 January 1985.

The name Yahoo! is an acronym for

YetAnotherHierarchicalOfficiousOracle," but Filo and Yang insist

they selected the name because they liked the general definition of a yahoo: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth.The word was invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his book Gulliver's Travels. It represents a person who is repulsive in appearance and action and is barely human. Yahoo! founders Jerry Yang and David Filo selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos.

The Greek root "xer" means dry. The inventor, ChestorCarlson , named his product Xerox as it was dry copying, markedly different from the then prevailing wet copying.