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Company
Names
Trivia |
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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". |
Volkswagen - Translates into "people's car", which
was a project of Ferdinand Porsche in the 1930s and 40s; to
produce a car which was affordable for the masses - the "Kraft-durch-Freude-Wagen" (or "Strength-Through-Joy
car", from a nazi social organization) which later became
known as the "Beetle") |
Yahoo! - a "backronym" for Yet Another Hierarchical
Officious Oracle. The word Yahoo was invented by Jonathan Swift
and used in his book Gulliver's Travels. It represents a person
who is repulsive in appearance action and is barely human.
Yahoo! founders David Filo and Jerry Yang selected the name
because they jokingly considered themselves yahoos. |
SAP - "Systems, Applications, Products in Data Processing",
formerly "SystemAnalyse und Programmentwicklung" (German
for "System analysis and program development"), formed
by 4 ex-IBM employees who used to work in the 'Systems/Applications/Projects'
group of IBM. |
Umbro - Umbro was founded in 1924 by the Humphrey (`Umphrey)
Brothers, Harold C. and Wallace. |
Waitrose - Upmarket supermarket in the UK originally named
after the founders: Wallace Waite, Arthur Rose and David Taylor.
The "Taylor" was later dropped. |
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.
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Mercedes - This is the first name of the daughter of Emil Jellinek,
who worked for the early Daimler company around 1900. |
HP - Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide
whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard
or Packard-Hewlett. |
Alfa Romeo - The company was originally known as ALFA, which
is an acronym meaning Anonima Lombarda Fabbrica Automobili.
When Nicola Romeo bought ALFA in 1915, his surname was appended
to the company name.
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