Today there are many well known companies around the world and here is a list of few well known company names with their name origins explained.
Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.
The word was invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his book Gulliver’s Travels. It represents a person who is repulsive in appearance and action and is barely human. Yahoo! Founders Jerry Yang and David Filo selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos.
The Greek root “xer” means dry. The inventor, Chestor Carlson, named his Product Xerox as it was dry copying, markedly different from the then prevailing Wet copying.
Founded by four Stanford University buddies, Sun is the acronym for Stanford University Network.
From the Latin word ‘sonus’ meaning sound, and ‘sonny’ a slang used by Americans to refer to a bright youngster.
“Systems, Applications, Products in Data Processing”, formed by four ex-IBM employees who used to work in the ‘Systems/Applications/Projects’ group of IBM.
Company founder Marc Ewing was given the Cornell lacrosse team cap
(with red and white stripes) while at college by his grandfather. He lost it and Had to search for it desperately. The manual of the beta version of Red Hat Linux had an appeal to readers to return his Red Hat if found by anyone!
Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consulting project for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The code name for the project was called Oracle (the CIA saw this as the system to give answers to all questions or something such).
Founder Paul Galvin came up with this name when his company started manufacturing radios for cars. The popular radio company at the time was Called Victrola.
It was coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was devoted to MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originally christened Micro-Soft, the ‘-‘ was Removed later on.
Mitch Kapor got the name for his company from the lotus position or ‘padmasana.’ Kapor used to be a teacher of Transcendental Meditation of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company ‘Moore Noyce’ but that was already trademarked by a hotel chain, so they had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics.
Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing email 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 programming language used to write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casings.
The name started as a jockey boast about the amount of information the search-engine would be able to search. It was originally named ‘Googol’, a word for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. After founders – Stanford graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page presented their project to an angel investor, they received a cheque made out to ‘Google
The name is not an acronym but an abbreviation of San Francisco. The company’s logo reflects its San Francisco name heritage. It represents a stylized Golden Gate Bridge.
Favourite fruit of founder Steve Jobs. He was three months late in filing a name for the business, and he threatened to call his company Apple Computers if the other colleagues didn’t suggest a better name by 5 o’clock.
It got its name because its founders got started by applying patches to code written for NCSA’s httpd daemon. The result was ‘A PAtCHy’ server – thus, the name Apache.
The name came from the river Adobe Creek that ran behind the house of founder John Warnock.
by 
February 16, 2010 at 8:40 pm
I like the Apache origin of its name. I thought it was really just some random thing. Now I know it is really “a patchy” and not some Indian dude. And for those who don’t know, Apache HTTP servers are one of the most widely-used to serve your websites. =D
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Kevin S Reply:
February 16th, 2010 at 10:20 pm
lol.. yes u r right
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February 16, 2010 at 9:16 pm
Awesome post man, I really was thinking what would have happened of Intel if they had taken the name Moore Noyce instead of Intel. Moore Noyce
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Kevin S Reply:
February 16th, 2010 at 10:21 pm
LoLzz.. Moore Noyce sounds funny
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February 17, 2010 at 10:59 am
I guess Steve Job’s colleagues didn’t come up with a better name ! That’s why it is cold Apple Computers. I like also where the SONY name came from.
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Kevin S Reply:
February 17th, 2010 at 11:03 am
I love the name Apple
yes, i too liked Sony name origin 
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February 18, 2010 at 3:41 am
I couldn’t help laughing at the name Moore Noyce being already copyrighted. How unlikely and unlucky is that. INTEL has a much better ring to it.
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February 18, 2010 at 7:13 pm
Never knew that about Cisco. Hotmail seems like a bit of a strange one – I don’t think I would have guessed that explanation in a million years! Beautiful site you have here by the way.
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Kevin S Reply:
February 18th, 2010 at 7:25 pm
hi, thanks you soo much for visiting our website.. we are coming up with more interesting topics so stay tuned..
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February 18, 2010 at 8:36 pm
Really nice post bro, i never knew about these in my life! its good to learn these and deal with those services!
You missed one famous name buddy, what about “Annanta”?
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February 19, 2010 at 6:16 pm
This is a really interesting subject. It is funny how some of these massive companies came up with what are now household names. I particularly like the Hotmail explanation. So simple yet brilliant. thanks again for this insight.
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February 19, 2010 at 8:36 pm
I do like the story behind Apple computers, picked unless an employee came up with something better before a day deadline. Awesome, how far they’ve come.
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February 20, 2010 at 7:04 pm
This is a really interesting topic. It is funny how some of these massive companies came up with what are now household names. I particularly like the Hotmail explanation. So simple yet brilliant. thanks again for this insight.
Adam @ Stainless Steel Mug´s last blog ..Privacy
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February 23, 2010 at 4:31 pm
thats amazing.. nice share bro
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February 24, 2010 at 4:32 am
Thanks for the nice sharing.
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Kevin S Reply:
February 24th, 2010 at 9:37 am
you are most welcome
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March 27, 2010 at 2:09 pm
Hmmm that was lot of name with interesting background. Interesting everything see so insecure in the beginning but now all name seen so strong!
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June 15, 2010 at 1:28 pm
iou
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June 16, 2010 at 12:37 am
Some of those are really fascinating, particularly Apple, the employees obviously couldn’t think of anything better lol! I can’t imagine them with another name now though, its their whole identity!
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September 2, 2010 at 5:38 pm
I appreciate this. loves the explanation on hotmail and Intel. Keep them coming, I’ll check back.
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