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Some company names depend on wordplay. Oprah Winfrey’s production company is called Harpo (Oprah backwards), much as the Beatles’ US merchandising company was Seltaeb. Ingvar Kamprad was born on a farm called Elmtaryd near the village of Agunnaryd, hence IKEA. Less obviously Swedish is middle England’s beloved Aga: the oven was produced by the firm Svenska Aktiebolaget Gasaccumulator (‘Swedish Gas Accumulator’). Haribo was started by Hans Riegel of Bonn, Qantas stands for Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services, and Amstrad denotes ‘Alan Michael Sugar Trading’. Hotmail took its name from HTML, and indeed was initially written as HoTMaiL.
Vodafone adopted a similar approach (‘Voice, Data, Telefone’), but other technology firms were more oblique. Jeff Bezos chose Amazon because it’s the world’s most voluminous river, symbolising the amount of business he hoped to do. Apple commemorates the summer Steve Jobs spent working in an orchard, while BlackBerry came from the device’s keyboard buttons, which resemble the fruit’s surface. Yahoo’s founders were making a joke against themselves, choosing the name in Gulliver’s Travels for a deformed savage. Literature also gave us the world’s most famous coffee chain: Starbuck is the chief mate in Moby-Dick.
Some firms seek inspiration in the classics. Argos was the Greek city in which Richard Tompkins was holidaying when he had the idea for the store. The carmaker August Horch translated his surname (which means ‘listen’ in his native German) into Latin and got Audi. Volvo, on the other hand, is Latin for ‘I roll’ — the firm originally made ball bearings. The sportswear firm ASICS took mens sana in corpore sano (a healthy mind in a healthy body) and changed the first word into anima (spirit). The drinks company Diageo (motto: ‘Celebrating life, every day, everywhere’) combines both languages: dia is Latin for ‘day’, geo Greek for ‘world’.
But beware of overthinking things. You might assume that Lego came from the Latin for ‘I collect’. Actually it’s a shortening of leg godt, the Danish for ‘play well’.
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