Company Name Etymologies

List of company name etymologies:

This is a list of company names with their name origins explained. Some
origins are disputed.

• Adobe – came from name of
  the river Adobe Creek that ran behind the house of founder John Warnock.

• Apache –
  It got its name because its founders got started by applying patches to code
  written for NCSA’s httpd daemon. The result was ‘A PAtCHy’ server — thus, the
  name Apache.
• Apple – favourite fruit of
  founder Steve Jobs. He was three months late in filing a name for the business,
  and he threatened to call his company Apple Computers if his colleagues didn’t
  suggest a better name by 5pm. Apple’s Macintosh is named after a popular variety
  of apple sold in the US.
• Canon – from Kwanon the
  Buddhist god of mercy. The name was changed to Canon to avoid offending
  religious groups.

• Casio – from the name of its founder,
  Kashio Tadao who had set up the company Kashio Seisakujo as a subcontractor
  factory.
• Cisco – its not an
  acronymn but its the short for San Francisco.

• Compaq – using Comp, for computer, and
  paq to denote a small integral object.
• Corel – from the founder’s name Dr.
  Michael Cowpland. It stands for COwpland
  REsearch Laboratory.

• Daewoo – the company founder Kim Woo
  Chong called it Daewoo which means "Great Universe" in Korean.

• Exxon – a name contrived by Esso
  (Standard Oil of New Jersey) in the early 70s to create a neutral but
  distinctive label for the company. Within days of announcement of the name,
  Exxon was being called the "double cross company " but this eventually subsided.
• Fuji – from the highest Japanese mountain
  Mount Fuji

• Google – the name started as a jokey
  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 grad students Sergey Brin and
  Larry Page presented their project to an angel investor, they received a cheque
  made out to ‘Google’ !
• Haier – Chinese 海尔
• HP – Bill Hewlett and Dave
  Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called
  Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.
• Hitachi – stands for "sunrise" in
  Japanese.
• Honda – from the name of its founder,
  Soichiro Honda

• Honeywell – from the name of
  Mark Honeywell founder of Honeywell Heating Specialty Co. It later merged with
  Minneapolis Heat Regulator Company and was finally called Honeywell Inc. in
  1963.
• Hotmail – Founder Jack Smith got the
  idea of accessing e-mail 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 markup language used to write web pages. It was
  initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casing.

• Hyundai – means "present time" in
  Korean.
• IBM – started by an ex employee of National
  Cash Register. To one-up them in all respects he called his company
  International Business Machines.

• Intel – 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
  INTegrated ELectronics.
• Kawasaki – from the name of its
  founder, Shozo Kawasaki

• Kodak – Both the Kodak camera
  and the name were the invention of founder George Eastman. The letter "K" was a
  favourite with Eastman; he felt it a strong and incisive letter. He tried out
  various combinations of words starting and ending with "K". He saw three
  advantages in the name. It had the merits of a trademark word, would not be
  mis-pronounced and the name did not resemble anything in the art. There is a
  misconception that the name was chosen because of its similarity to the sound
  produced by the shutter of the camera.

• Konica – it was earlier known as
  Konishiroku Kogaku. Konishiroku in turn is the
  short for Konishiya Rokubeiten which was the
  first name of the company established by Rokusaburo Sugiura in the 1850s.

• LG – combination of two popular Korean brands
  Lucky and Goldstar.
• Lotus – Mitch Kapor got the
  name for his company from ‘The Lotus Position’ or ‘Padmasana’. Kapor used to be
  a teacher of Transcendental Meditation technique as taught by Maharishi Mahesh
  Yogi.
• Microsoft – coined by Bill Gates
  to represent the company that was devoted to MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originally
  christened Micro-Soft, the ‘-‘ was removed later on.

• Mitsubishi – name coined by
  founder Yataro Iwasaki in 1870. It means "three diamonds" in Japanese. The three
  diamonds also make up the company’s logo.
• Motorola – Founder Paul Galvin
  came up with this name when his company started manufacturing radios for carss.
  Many audio equiptment makers of the era used the "ola" ending for their
  products, most famously the "Victrola" phonograph made by the Victor Talking
  Machine Company.

• Mozilla Foundation –
  From the name of the web-browser that succeeded Netscape Navigator. When Marc
  Andreesen, founder of Netscape,
  created a browser to replace the Mosaic browser, it was internally named Mozilla
  (Mosaic-Killer, Godzilla).

• Nabisco – Formerly The National
  Biscuit Company, changed in 1971 to Nabisco.
• Nikon – the original name was
  Nippon Kogaku, meaning "Japanese Optical".

• Nintendo – Nintendo is composed of
  3 Japanese Kanji characters, Nin-ten-do which can be translated to "Heaven
  blesses hard work"

• Nissan – the company was earlier known
  by the name Nichon Sangio which means
  "Japanese industry".
• 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.

• Novell – Novell, Inc. was
  earlier Novell Data Systems co-founded by George Canova. The name was suggested
  by George’s wife who mistakenly thought that "Novell" meant "new" in French.

• Oracle – Larry Ellison
  and Bob Oats were working on a consulting project for the CIA (Central
  Intelligence Agency). The code name for the project was called Oracle (the CIA
  saw this as the system to give answers to all questions or some such). The
  project was designed to help use the newly written SQL database language from
  IBM. The project eventually was terminated but Larry and Bob decided to finish
  what they started and bring it to the world. They kept the name Oracle and
  created the RDBMS engine. Later they kept the same name for the company.
• Red Hat – Company founder Marc
  Ewing was given the Cornell lacrosse team cap (with red and white stripes) while
  at college by his grandfather. People would turn to him to solve their problems,
  and he was referred to as ‘that guy in the red hat’. He lost the cap and had to
  search for it desperately. The manual of the beta version of Red Hat Linux had
  an appeal to readers to return his Red Hat if found by anyone.
• Sanyo – The Japanese translation is disputed,
  although the Chinese name is "三洋" (literally, "Three Oceans")

• SAP – "Systems, Applications,
  Productss in Data Processing", formed by 4 ex-IBM employees who used to work in
  the ‘Systems/Applications/Projects’ group of IBM.

• SCO – from Santa Cruz
  Operation. The company’s office was in Santa Cruz, California. It became the
  eventually licensor for Unix (via Unix Systems Labs and then Novell), and
  eventually went bankrupt. The assets were purchased by Caldera Inc (itself a
  spin off of Novell) and Caldera changed its own name back to SCO. It is this SCO
  which has sued IBM and others, asserting its ownership of the copyright to Unix
  source code.
• Siemens – founded in 1847 by
  Werner von Siemens.
• Sony – from the Latin word ‘sonus’ meaning
  sound, and ‘sonny’ a slang used by Americans to refer to a bright youngster.
• Subaru – from the Japanese name for
  the star cluster known to Westerners as Pleiades or the Seven Sisters. This star
  cluster features on the company’s logo.

• SUN – founded by 4 Stanford
  University buddies, SUN is the acronym for Stanford University Network.
• Suzuki – from the name of its founder,
  Michio Suzuki

• Tesco – Founder Jack Cohen, who from
  1919 sold groceries in the markets of the London East End, acquired a large
  shipment of tea from T. E. Stockwell and made new labels by using the first
  three letters of the supplier’s name and the first two letters of his surname
  forming the word "TESCO".
• Toshiba – was founded by the merger
  of consumer goods company Tokyo Denki (Tokyo Electric Co) and
  electrical firm Shibaura Seisaku-sho (Shibaura Engineering
  Works).

• Toyota – from the founder’s name
  Sakichi Toyoda. Initially called Toyeda, it was changed after a contest for a
  better-sounding name. The new name was written in eight Japanese letters, a
  number that is considered lucky in Japan.
• Xerox – The inventor, Chestor Carlson,
  named his product trying to say `dry’ (as it was dry copying, markedly different
  from the then prevailing wet copying). The Greek root `xer’ means dry.

• Yahoo – 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. However, Yahoo! today claims a sort of backformed acronym —
  Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.
• 3M – Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing
  Company started off by mining the material corundum used to make sandpaper.

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Update: Fixed misformed URLs