Where do company names come from?
Do you ever wonder how popular
companies got their names?
Accenture: From “Accent on the future.” Formerly Anderson Consulting, the name was proposed by an employee during an internal naming process.
Adobe Systems: From Adobe Creek located behind the house of co-founder John Warnock.
Arby’s: The enunciation of the initials of its founders, the Raffel Brothers.
CVS: Originally Consumer Value Stores, CEO Tom Ryan has said he now considers “CVS” to stand for “Customer, Value, and Service.”
Kinko’s: From the college nickname of founder Paul Orfalea, called “Kinko” because of his curly red hair. The company was purchased by FedEx in 2004.
Nabisco: Formerly The National Biscuit Company, changed in 1971 to Nabisco.
Pepsi: Named from the digestive enzyme pepsin.
Skype: The original concept for the name was Sky-Peer-to-Peer, which morphed into Skyper, then Skype.
Sprint: From its parent company, Southern Pacific Railroad INTernal Communications.
Verizon: A portmanteau of veritas (Latin for “truth”) and horizon.
Volvo: From the Latin word volvo, which means “I roll.”
Yahoo!: A word first appearing in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, a “yahoo” is a member of a race of brutes who have the form and all the vices of humans. Yahoo! founders David Filo and Jerry Yang jokingly considered themselves yahoos.
Source: Wikipedia