Στη σελίδα List of company name etymologies της Wikipedia υπάρχει ένας κατάλογος με περισσότερες από 600 επωνυμίες και πώς πήραν το όνομά τους. Καταθέτω εδώ τις επωνυμίες που βρήκα πιο ενδιαφέρουσες, για να μην μου κουράζεστε.
- 20th Century Fox – Film studio; formed in 1935 through the merger of William Fox’s Fox Film, and Twentieth Century Pictures.
- 3Com – Network technology producer; the three coms are computer, communication, and compatibility.
- 7-Eleven – Convenience stores; renamed from "U-Tote’m" in 1946 to reflect their newly extended hours, 7:00 am until 11:00 pm
- Adidas – from the name of the founder Adolf (Adi) Dassler.
- Adobe Systems – from the Adobe Creek that ran behind the house of co-founder John Warnock.
- Alfa Romeo – the company was originally known as ALFA, an acronym for Anonima Lombarda Fabbrica Automobili. When Nicola Romeo bought ALFA in 1915, his surname was appended.
- AltaVista – Spanish for "high view".
- Amazon.com – founder Jeff Bezos renamed the company Amazon (from the earlier name of Cadabra.com) after the world’s most voluminous river, the Amazon. He saw the potential for a larger volume of sales in an online (as opposed to a bricks and mortar) bookstore.
- Amiga Corporation – The original developers of the 16-bit Amiga computer chose the name, which means a ‘female friend’ in Spanish and Portuguese, because it sounded friendly, and because it came before rivals (Apple Inc. and Atari) alphabetically.
- Amstrad – Amstrad Consumer Electronics plc was founded by Lord Alan Michael Sugar in the UK. The name is a contraction of Alan Michael Sugar Trading.
- Apple – For the favorite fruit of co-founder Steve Jobs and/or for the time he worked at an apple orchard, and to distance itself from the cold, unapproachable, complicated imagery created by other computer companies at the time – which had names such as IBM, DEC, and Cincom
- Apricot Computers – early UK-based microcomputer company founded by ACT (Applied Computer Techniques), a business software and services supplier. The company wanted a "fruity" name (Apple and Acorn were popular brands) that included the letters A, C and T. Apricot fit the bill.
- Aston Martin – from the "Aston Hill" races (near Aston Clinton) where the company was founded, and the surname of Lionel Martin, the company’s founder.
- Atari – named from the board game Go. "Atari" is a Japanese word to describe a position where an opponent’s stones are in danger of being captured. It is similar, though not identical, to "check" in chess. The original games company was American but wanted a Japanese-sounding name.
- Audi – Latin translation of the German name "Horch". The founder August Horch left the company after five years, but still wanted to manufacture cars. Since the original "Horch" company was still there, he called his new company Audi, the Latin form of his last name. In English it is "hark".
- Blaupunkt – Blaupunkt ("Blue dot") was founded in 1923 under the name "Ideal". Its core business was the manufacturing of headphones. If the headphones came through quality tests, the company would give the headphones a blue dot. The headphones quickly became known as the blue dots or blaue Punkte. The quality symbol would become a trademark and the trademark would become the company name in 1938.
- BMW – Bayerische Motoren Werke (Bavarian Motor Works).
- Cadillac – named after the 18th century French explorer Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, founder of Detroit, Michigan. Cadillac is a small town in the South of France. The company, founded in 1902, was purchased by General Motors in 1909 and survives to this day as a GM brand.
- Carrefour – chain of supermarkets and hypermarkets which started with a store near a crossroads (carrefour in French) in Annecy.
- Caterpillar – Originally Holt Tractor Co, merged with Best Tractor Co. in 1925. A company photographer exclaimed aloud of a Holt tractor that the tracks’ movement resembled a caterpillar moving along the ground. The name stuck.
- Daewoo – company founder Kim Woo Chong called it Daewoo which means "Great House" or "Great Universe" in Korean.
- DHL – named after its founders, Adrian Dalsey, Larry Hillblom, and Robert Lynn.
- Dixons – commonly used abbreviation for DSG International plc (Dixons Stores Group), a UK-based retailer. The company was founded in 1937 by Charles Kalms and Michael Mindel. When opening their first photographic shop in Southend, they only had room for six letters on the fascia, and chose the name Dixons from the phone book.
- Epson – Epson Seiko Corporation, the Japanese printer and peripheral manufacturer, was named from "Son of Electronic Printer" after a highly successful model, the EP-101
- Esso – the enunciation of the initials S.O. in Standard Oil of New Jersey.
- Facebook – name stems from the colloquial name of books given to newly enrolled students at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the US with the intention of helping students to get to know each other better.
- Fiat – acronym of Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino (Italian Automobile Factory of Turin)
- Google – an originally accidental misspelling of the word googol and settled upon because google.com was unregistered. Googol was proposed to reflect the company’s mission to organize the immense amount of information available online.
- Häagen-Dazs – Name was invented in 1961 by ice-cream makers Reuben and Rose Mattus of the Bronx "to convey an aura of the old-world traditions and craftsmanship". The name has no meaning.
- Hasbro – founded by Henry and Helal Hassenfeld, the Hassenfeld Brothers.
- HP – Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.
- Hitachi – old place name, literally "sunrise"
- Hotmail – Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing e-mail via the web from a computer anywhere in the world. When Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service he tried all kinds of names ending in ‘mail’ and finally settled for Hotmail as it included the letters "HTML" – the markup language used to write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casing. (At one time, if you clicked on Hotmail’s ‘mail’ tab, you would have seen "HoTMaiL" in the URL, but since Hotmail is now Windows Live Mail, it is no longer there.)
- IKEA – a composite of the first letters in the Swedish founder Ingvar Kamprad’s name in addition to the first letters of the names of the property and the village in which he grew up: Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd.
- Intel – Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore initially incorporated their company as N M Electronics. Someone suggested Moore Noyce Electronics but it sounded too close to "more noise". Later, Integrated Electronics was proposed but it had already been taken, so they used the initial syllables (INTegrated ELectronics). To avoid potential conflicts with other companies with similar names, Intel purchased the name rights for $15,000 from a company called Intelco. (Source: Intel 15 Years Corporate Anniversary Brochure)
- Kodak – Both the Kodak camera and the name were the invention of founder George Eastman. The letter "K" was a favorite with Eastman; he felt it a strong and incisive letter. He tried out various combinations of words starting and ending with "K". He saw three advantages in the name. It had the merits of a trademark word, would not be mispronounced and the name did not resemble anything in the art. There is a misconception that the name was chosen because of its similarity to the sound produced by the shutter of the camera.
- Lada – from the name of a Slavic goddess, and used as a trading name by Russian automobile manufacturer AvtoVAZ (АВТОВАЗ in Russian). VAZ is derived from Volzhsky Automobilny Zavod.
- Mazda Motor Corporation – the company was founded as Toyo Kogyo, started manufacturing Mazda brand cars in 1931, and changed its name to Mazda in 1984. The cars were supposedly named after Ahura Mazda, the chief deity of the Zoroastrians, though many think this explanation was created after the fact, to cover up what is simply a poor anglicized version of the founders name, Jujiro Matsuda.
- Mercedes – from the first name of the daughter of Emil Jellinek, who distributed cars of the early Daimler company around 1900.
- Motorola – Founder Paul Galvin came up with this name when his company (at the time, Galvin Manufacturing Company) started manufacturing radios for cars. Many audio equipment makers of the era used the "ola" ending for their products, most famously the "Victrola" phonograph made by the Victor Talking Machine Company. The name was meant to convey the idea of "sound" and "motion". It became so widely recognized that the company later adopted it as the company name.
- Mozilla Foundation – from the name of the web browser that preceded Netscape Navigator. When Marc Andreesen, co-founder of Netscape, created a browser to replace the Mosaic browser, it was internally named Mozilla (Mosaic-Killer, Godzilla) by Jamie Zawinski.
- Nestlé – named after its founder, Henri Nestlé, who was born in Germany under the name "Nestle", which is German (actually, Swabian diminutive) for "bird’s nest". The company logo is a bird’s nest with a mother bird and two chicks.
- Novell – Novell, Inc. was earlier Novell Data Systems co-founded by George Canova. The name was suggested by George’s wife who mistakenly thought that "Novell" meant new in French. (Nouvelle is the feminine form of the French adjective ‘Nouveau’. Nouvelle as a noun in French is ‘news’.)
- Osram – from osmium and wolfram.
- Psion – UK computer company named by its founder, South Africa-born Dr David Potter, from Potter Scientific Instruments Or Nothing.
- Samsung – meaning three stars in Korean.
- Sanyo – meaning three oceans in Japanese.
- Sega – Service Games of Japan was founded by Marty Bromley (an American) to import pinball games to Japan for use on American military bases.
- Shell – Royal Dutch/Shell was established in 1907, when the Royal Dutch Petrol Society Plc. and the Shell Transport and Trading Company Ltd. merged their operations. The Shell Transport and Trading Company Ltd had been established at the end of the 19th century by commercial firm Samuel & Co (founded in 1830). Samuel & Co was already importing Japanese shells when it set up an oil company, so the oil company was named after the shells.
- Skype – the original concept for the name was Sky-Peer-to-Peer, which morphed into Skyper, then Skype.
- Sony – from the Latin word ‘sonus’ meaning sound, and ‘sonny’ a slang word used by Americans to refer to a bright youngster, "since we were sonny boys working in sound and vision", said Akio Morita. The company was founded as Tokyo Tsoshiu Kogyo KK (Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation) in 1946, and changed its name to Sony in 1958. Sony was chosen as it could be pronounced easily in many languages.
- Starbucks – named after Starbuck, a character in Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick, also a variation of Starbo; at the time, a local mining camp north of Seattle.
- Subaru – from the Japanese name for the constellation known to Westerners as Pleiades or the Seven Sisters. Subaru’s parent company, Fuji Heavy Industries, was formed from a merger of six companies, and the constellation is featured on the company’s logo.
- Taser International – named after a fictional weapon, Thomas A. Swift’s Electric Rifle, after the novel Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle by Victor Appleton. The company was incorporated in Arizona in 1993 by brothers Rick and Tom Smith as Air Taser, Inc.).
- Tesco – founder Jack Cohen – who sold groceries in the markets of the London East End from 1919 – acquired a large shipment of tea from T. E. Stockwell. He made new labels by using the first three letters of the supplier’s name and the first two letters of his surname.
- Toyota – from the name of the founder, Sakichi Toyoda. Initially called Toyeda, it was changed after a contest for a better-sounding name. The new name was written in katakana with eight strokes, a number that is considered lucky in Japan.
- Twitter – Having rejected the name Twitch for their social networking service, co-founder Jack Dorsey says: "we looked in the dictionary for words around it and we came across the word ‘twitter’ and it was just perfect. The definition was ‘a short burst of inconsequential information’, and ‘chirps from birds’. And that’s exactly what the product was."
- Virgin – founder Richard Branson started a magazine called Student while still at school. In his autobiography, Losing My Virginity, Branson says that when they were starting a business to sell records by mail order, "one of the girls suggested: ‘What about Virgin? We’re complete virgins at business.’"
- Vodafone – from Voice, Data, Telefone. Vodafone made the UK’s first mobile call at a few minutes past midnight on 1 January 1985.
- Volvo – from the Latin word volvo, which means "I roll". It was originally a name for a ball bearing being developed by SKF.
- Yahoo! – 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 and barely human. Yahoo! founders David Filo and Jerry Yang jokingly considered themselves yahoos. It’s also an interjection sometimes associated with United States Southerners’ and Westerners’ expression of joy, as alluded to in Yahoo.com commercials that end with someone singing the word "yahoo". It is also sometime jokingly referred to by its backronym, Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.
