Did you ever wonder why Twitter is called that? When cofounder Biz Stone saw the application that Jack Dorsey created in 2006 he was reminded of the way birds communicate: "Short bursts of information...Everyone is chirping, having a good time." In response, Stone came up with 'twttr', and the group eventually added some vowels. How about Google? Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin named the search engine they built “Google,” a play on the word “googol,” the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. The name reflects the immense volume of information that exists, and the scope of Google’s mission: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.Yahoo! started out as "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" but eventually received a new moniker with the help of a dictionary. The name Yahoo! is an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they liked the general definition of a yahoo: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." Yahoo! itself first resided on Yang's student workstation, "Akebono," while the software was lodged on Filo's computer, "Konishiki" - both named after legendary sumo wrestlers. The name Wikipedia is a portmanteau of wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites) and encyclopedia. FYI: a portmanteau is a fancy way of saying that we're going to take two words, jam them together and (hopefully) create a new concept that people will love, whereas Facebook's name stems from the colloquial name of books given at the start of the school year by university administrations with the intention of helping students get to know each other better.Famous online bookstore Amazon was originally named Cadabra, Inc., but the name was changed when it was discovered that people sometimes heard the name as "Cadaver." The name Amazon.com was chosen because the Amazon River is the largest river in the world, and so the name suggests large size, and also in part because it starts with 'A' and therefore would show up near thebeginning of alphabetical lists. The do it yourself reveiw site Yelp! is an onomatopoeia. So is there a science to these sucessful names? They are all catchy, pop culture icons to be sure. I think there are some basics to finding a catchy name. Many companies rely on rhyming, imagry, and alliteration. Other naming tricks include Neologism, that is making up an evocative word, like Google, or onomatopoeia, a word that sounds like what it stands for.
