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Ever wonder where words come from, especially those words that serve as brand names?
Pretty easy to guess how General Electric got its name, but others are not so obvious.
This quiz tests your brand IQ (8 questions in all, scroll down for answers.)
1. Skype
(skipe, rhymes with "type")
Where does the word "Skype" come from?
(choose the one best answer)
a. Derives from Old Norse "skajp," a trivial theft (related to our slang word "kype").
b. Contraction of "skip-the-hype," an early mantra because the technology worked.
c. Shortened from "Skyper," a geeky nickname combining "sky" plus "peer-to-peer."
d. A random letter-string; it's just a short, internet domain name that they could get.
In April of 2003 Skype.com
was registered by entrepreneurs
Niklaus Zenstrom and Janus Friis of Luxembourg
(who have since launched Kazaa and Joost).
Thirty months later Skype was acquired by eBay
for about 3 large (after cash, stock and earn-out)
and while a lot of "grown-ups" can't tell you what it is they do,
amazingly every 20-year-old on the planet can.
All other internet phones utilize a client/server
configuration to centralize traffic,
but only Skype uses peer-to-peer
technology to distribute it
-- so C is correct.
2. Google
1. noun, the premier internet search engine; 2. verb, to obtain information using it
Where does the word "Google" come from?
(choose the one best answer)
a. Comes from "goggle"(s), worn to safely enable staring directly at or into something.
b. Inventive spelling for "googol," a math term for a 1 followed by one hundred zeroes.
c. Derives from "gaggle," the collective noun designating a great multitude of geese.
d. Only thing Larry and Sergey had in common was Barney Google & Snuffy Smith.
Codenamed BackRub in 1996
(it analyzed back-links to web sites)
Google was added to the Oxford English Dictionary
in June of 2006. Playing off of "googol"
itself a neologism coined in 1930 by 9-year old
Milton Sirotta whose uncle Ed Kasner was a math wiz,
it reflects the company's mission to organize everything.
SUN founder and angel investor Andy Bechtolsheim
must have known that googol.com had already
been registered by Tim Beauchamp in 1995
because he made his check for $100,000
payable to "Google Inc"
-- so B is correct.
3. IKEA
world's leading home furnishings retailer, known for affordable design and function
Where does the word "IKEA" come from?
(choose the one best answer)
a. Infamous misspelling of the word “idea” in founder’s business plan to investors.
b. A random letter-string, it was a short internet domain name that they could get.
c. Derives from the Scandinavian “ike hea” which means “some assembly required.”
d. Acronym trademarked in 1943 stands for Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd.
With more than 220 stores
in over 30 countries around the world
featuring over 12,000 products, its hard to imagine
the original IKEA sold matches and pens from a bike!
But the world changed with the introduction
of Danish Modern modular furniture,
and flat packaging which sent that furniture home in a box.
It all goes back to that cold day in 1926
when an enterprising young man
named Ingvar Kamprad was born
on the family farm known as Elmtaryd,
in the south Swedish town of Agunnaryd
-- so D is correct.
4. PEZ
pressed, dry candies shaped like tiny bricks, whose patented dispensers are collectables
Where does the word "PEZ" come from?
(choose the one best answer)
a. Named for conquistador and sweet-tooth Francisco Pezarro, who founded Lima.
b. Initialization formed from the founders' names: Philippe, Enrique and Ziegfried.
c. They are the first, middle and last letters in Pfefferminz, German for "peppermint."
d. Trademarked acronym stands for "Pep, Energy and Zest," the original ad slogan.
Despite the enormous popularity
of their +450 unique dispenser heads
including Santa, Kermit, Casper, Pinocchio and SpongeBob,
PEZ still considers itself a candy company.
Invented in 1926 by Eduard Haas
and marketed to adults as an alternative to smoking,
the original container was designed
to look like the popular Zippo lighter.
It wasn't until nearly 30 years later in 1955
that character heads were added,
in the Austrian company's succesful effort
to reposition the peppermints to children
-- so C is correct.
5. Lycos
web search engine providing summaries of pages matching search requests
Where does the word "Lycos" come from?
(choose the one best answer)
a. After the Island of Lykos in Greek mythology, where lost things are found.
b. Coined from adjacent letters in the name of mathematician VasiLY COSinski.
c. Acronym for the shareware utility, "Look - Yield - Command - Option - Search."
d. Derived from the Latin term Lycosidae Lycosa, the "Wolf Spider," who hunts.
The last thing the
computer industry needed
in the 1990's was another acronym,
so when Al Gore (and others) invented the Internet,
they called it the "Information Superhighway."
Once past the donkey-braying dial-up procedure,
newbies crawled through an array of unsorted sites
(albeit free from cookies and popups).
As intelligence migrated from the server to the browser,
Lycos promised web surfers
the distinction of hunting
rather than waiting
-- so D is correct.
6. adidas
athletic footwear brand whose famous 3-stripe logo
is also found on watches, apparel, eyewear and perfume
Where does the word "adidas" come from?
(choose the one best answer)
a. Contraction of German shoemaker and uber boot buff, Adolf Dassler.
b. An American acronym, it stands for: "All Day I Dream About Sports."
c. Derived from Latin aditus, which means "access," from adire, "to go."
d. From Homer's Odyssey; it's named for Achilles' dog, that never tires.
26 years before Nike's Phil Knight
renamed Blue Ribbon Sports
in honor of the Greek Goddess of Victory,
the adidas trademark was registered.
Today this house-of-brands
includes Salomon (skis, bindings),
TaylorMade (golf clubs) and MaxFli (golf balls).
1936 Berliners watched as Jesse Owens
won 4 Olympic Gold Medals wearing shoes
from Gebruder Dassler Schuhfabrik;
twelve years later "Adi's" brother
Rudolf started rival Puma
-- so A is correct.
7. Cisco
worldwide technological leader in networking solutions for the internet
Where does the word "Cisco" come from?
(choose the one best answer)
a. It's a loan-word from the animal kingdom, where a "cisco" is a fish.
b. A toponym, or place-name, it derives from the city of San FranCISCO.
c. Literary reference to that Kid in O. Henry's Robin Hood of the West.
d. An acronym, it stands for Computer Interactive Sciences COmpany.
There really is a trout-like
freshwater herring called the 'cisco,'
there really is a company
called Computer Interactive Sciences,
and Pancho's sideburned sidekick
in O. Henry's yarn really is called The Cisco Kid.
But none of these facts were factors
in naming this networking king.
As their Golden Gate Bridge logo suggests,
the name comes from the last five letters
of that city by the bay where the VC dough
once flowed like water
-- so B is correct.
8. Starbucks
the premiere purveyor of fine coffees with more than 12,000 retail locations
Where does the word "Starbucks" come from?
(choose the one best answer)
a. Named after U.S. Figure Skating Champion (and owner) Jo Jo Starbuck.
b. Literary reference, from Herman Melville's epic 1851 novel Moby Dick.
c. The funny pages, it's Daddy Warbucks' pet name for Little Orphan Annie.
d. 1920's slang, a unit of currency equal to $50, or 5 sawbucks ($10 each).
In 1971 as Kenneth
Shelley and Jo Jo Starbuck
were putting the pairs competition on ice,
three Seattle slackers named Jerry Baldwin,
Gordon Bowker and Zev Seigl were busy
reinventing the corner coffee shop.
For their logo, they chose the two-tailed siren
(common in medieval literature)
as a symbol of strength and power.
For the name of their now ubiquitous java huts,
they borrowed that of Captain Ahab's
java-swilling first mate
-- so B is correct.
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