What’s in a name? Well, a huge amount. Many companies’ fortunes can be made or broken by their name, so it’s crucial to get it right – but how on earth do you make that kind of decision? From the world-famous coffee chain named after a book character, to the music streaming service whose name was created by accident, click or scroll through to learn the weird and wonderful stories behind famous companies’ monikers.

We now know it as a car manufacturer but the Mitsubishi company started as a shipping firm in 1870. The name Mitsubishi consists of two parts: "mistu" meaning "three", and "bishi" meaning "water chestnut" or "rhombus". The three rhombuses are also translated as three diamonds and are reflected in the company’s logo.

The iconic soft drink has been around since 1886, when Doctor John S Pemberton invented the formula, selling it at the local chemist for five cents a glass. Yet it was his bookkeeper that came up with the name, according to the website. He suggested that “the two Cs would look well in advertising”, and with that he designed the logo. It’s also widely speculated that “coca” stems from the coca leaves once used in the product, and “cola” from kola nuts.

Believe it or not, Nintendo was founded in 1889 – although it didn’t start out selling video games. Originally, the company sold hand-painted playing cards called hanafuda, and it’s thought that the name came from the words “Nin”, which means “entrusted”, and “ten-dou”, which means “heaven.” Roughly translated, it means “Leave luck to heaven.”

In 1893, drugstore owner Caleb Davis Bradham created ‘Brad’s drink’, made from a mix of sugar, water, caramel, lemon oil, nutmeg and other natural additives. It became an overnight sensation. Despite its name and hearsay, pepsin was never an ingredient of Pepsi-Cola. On 28 August 1898, Bradham renamed his drink “Pepsi-Cola". He believed the drink was more than a refreshment but a “healthy” cola, aiding indigestion, getting its roots from the word dyspepsia, meaning indigestion. The company took the name PepsiCo in 1965.

Most company founders probably wouldn’t start at the letter X when coming up with names. Yet in the case of printing company Xerox, the name comes from a method of copying called xerography, which was named after the Greek words "xeros" meaning "dry", and "graphia" meaning "writing". Formerly called The Haloid Photographic Company, it changed its name to Xerox after the technique.

The Kmart Corporation (simply known as Kmart) is one of the biggest names in US retail. The company started life in 1899 as the S.S. Kresge Company, with its first store opening in Detroit. The first store with the Kmart name, referencing the 'K' at the start of founder Sebastian Spering Kresge's surname, opened in Graden City, Michigan in 1962 and the company was subsequently renamed as the Kmart Corporation in 1977. At its peak in 2000, Kmart operated 2,171 stores, including 105 Super Kmart Center locations.

Best-selling tissue brand Kleenex didn’t get its unusual name straight away. Instead, the company founded in 1924 sold its first product under the name Kotex, which was supposed to symbolise its soft texture while being an easy name to remember. The shift to Kleenex came about when the company started selling tissues that were designed as cream removers and wanted to emphasise cleanliness, adopting the “Kleen” prefix. They kept the “ex” at the end to show it was from the same family of products.

To this day, no one knows the exact reason behind the carbonated lemon and lime drink’s unusual name. 7 Up was invented in October 1929 by Charles Leiper Grigg and there are several theories about the name, including: it was chosen because there are seven ingredients in the products; its inventor claimed it could cure "seven hangovers"; and that Grigg won a lot of money at a game of craps, a dice game, thanks to all the sevens that were rolled.

Josef Schwarz started the German company, then a small independent grocery wholesaler, in the 1930s. He quickly realised he couldn’t call it after himself because "Scharz Markt" means "black market". So instead he took the name from one of his business partners, a Mr Lidl.

The name 'LEGO' is an abbreviation of the two Danish words "leg godt", meaning "play well". The LEGO Group was founded in 1932 by Ole Kirk Kristiansen. The company has passed from father to son and is now owned by Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, a grandchild of the founder. It has come a long way over the past almost 90 years, from a small carpenter’s workshop to a modern, global enterprise that is now one of the world’s largest manufacturers of toys.

Canon’s predecessor, Precision Optical Industry, was founded in 1937 in Tokyo. A year later it produced its first camera, the Kwanon, which was named after the Buddhist bodhisattva of Mercy, but this was soon changed to Canon which was more universally recognised. In 1947, Precision Optical Industry changed its company name to Canon and the rest is history.

In Hitler’s Germany in 1937, Volkswagenwerk, or "People’s Car Company", was launched. After the war, the Allies made Volkswagen the focus of rebuilding the Germany auto industry. Sales were initially slow in the US because of the Nazi associations, but the creation of the Beetle meant they began to take off. Now the VW (Volks (People’s) Wagen (‘Car’) is one of the word’s biggest car brands.

Samsung, which was originally founded as a grocery trading store in 1938, entered the electronics industry in 1969 when its first products were black-and-white televisions, before it began making the smartphones it's now renowned for in the early 2000s. In Korean, the word "samsung" translates as "three stars". It was picked by Samsung founder Lee Byung-chull when the company was created, with the idea of it one day becoming as powerful and ever-lasting as the stars in the skies. In Korean the number three is used to represent something that is big and powerful.

Read more about Samsung's incredible success story, from grocery store to tech titans

Known throughout the world for its flatpack furniture and egalitarian design aesthetic, the furniture giant IKEA’s first shop was set up in Almhult, southern Sweden in 1943. IKEA is named after the initials of its founder Ingvar Kamprad, Elmtaryd, the farm on which he grew up, and Agunnaryd, the nearby village. Simple and practical, just like the company's aesthetic.

Read more about Ingvar Kamprad's life and the business he built

The global electronics giant Sony was founded in Tokyo in 1946 by Ibuka Masaru and Morita Akio, and the first product it sold was a rice cooker. It branched out into creating radios in the 1950s, before becoming a broader electronics company in the 1960s. The name Sony was derived from the Latin "sonus", meaning "sound", and was chosen as it was thought that it would work well on an international scale.

Aldi started life in 1946, when Karl and Theo Albrecht took control of their mother’s grocery store in the German city of Essen. From the small provincial store, they built one of Germany’s biggest retailers, which became renowned for its low prices. The name Aldi is simply a combination of the "Al" from Albrecht and the "Di" in Discount. 

The history of Aldi and how the German supermarket took over the world

There's a popular urban myth that adidas, founded in 1949, got its name is an acronym for "All Day I Dream About Sports". The truth is somewhat more prosaic. It's an amalgam of founder Adolf 'Adi' Dassler's nickname and surname.

Visa was originally launched as Bank Americard in 1958 by the Bank of America. Yet when the credit card programme spread to other countries, it needed a new name. So in 1970 the National Bank Americard Inc. was renamed to Visa, a word chosen because it already existed in several languages and was easy to pronounce. It also hinted at the idea of travel visas, suggesting universal acceptance.

You might expect this iconic fast food chain’s name to have something to do with bells – but in fact it’s a red herring. The name actually comes from the company founder, Graham Bell, who had a fast food restaurant called Bell’s Drive-In and Taco Tia in San Bernardino, California, which opened in 1954. It wasn’t until he opened another restaurant in Downey, California in 1962 that he renamed it to Taco Bell, which was then franchised two years later.

CVS Pharmacy is a subsidiary of the American company CVS Health. It was also known as, and originally named, the Consumer Value Store and was founded in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1963. Its owner Melville Corporation later changed its name to CVS Corporation in 1996 after Melville sold off many of its non-pharmacy stores. The last of its non-drugstore operations were sold in 1997. CEO Tom Ryan has said he now considers "CVS" to stand for "Convenience, Value, and Service".

Founded in 1964 by Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman as Blue Ribbon Sports, the company was initially just a distributor. By 1971, Knight and BRS wanted to manufacture their own shoes. That June, the company was ready to ship their first load and it desperately needed a new name for the next day. At 7am, a colleague suggested the name "Nike", the Greek winged goddess of victory. And even though Knight and Bowerman only considered it the best of a bad bunch, Nike duly became the brand name. 

From Nike to IKEA, the big companies that started with nothing

In 1965 Fred DeLuca borrowed some money from his friend Pete to start a business. The place was initially called “Pete’s Super Submarines”, named after the popular submarine sandwiches at the time. The business expanded and the name was later shortened to “Pete’s Submarines”. However, it’s said that during radio ad broadcasting the name sounded like pizza marines, so it was shortened further to "Pete’s Subs". Then in 1968, it got its current name Subway, probably due to the US-wide expansion.

Intel, founded in 1968, is a US manufacturer of computer circuits. It was started by engineers Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore with $2.5 million worth of funding from American financier Arthur Rock. The name was an amalgam of “integrated electronics”, although they had to buy the rights to the name from an existing company, Intelco, first.

In 1970, when Richard Branson and his team were teenagers sitting in a room joking about tradenames for their record company, they initially considered "Slipped Disc". As Branson himself points out: "But how could we have grown that brand from music into all sorts of different areas? Slipped Disc Airlines – now that’s not so good!" Instead, they picked the name Virgin as they joked that everyone was a virgin in business. As they'd hoped, the brand name’s been able to grow into multiple sectors. 

Discover more about Richard Branson and his Virgin empire

Brainstorming ideas for their coffee company, Gordon Bowker considered the name Cargo House, until friend Terry Heckler mentioned that he believed words that started with the prefix “st” were powerful. Then someone else in the group brought out an old mining map, finding a town named Starbo. Seeing the town of Starbo immediately reminded Bowker of the first mate, Starbuck, in Herman Melville’s classic American novel Moby Dick, and a megabrand was born. The first Starbucks opened in Pike place, Seattle, in 1971.

Amancio Ortega opened the first store under the Zara name in 1975 in A Coruña, Spain, although the company had been operating as a textile manufacturer in A Coruña since 1963. Initially, Ortega had named it Zorba, after the classic film Zorba the Greek (1964). However, he soon realised that, just two blocks away, there was a bar called the exact same thing. He already had the letters made for the store sign, so he simply re-arranged them to form the word "Zara" (it’s thought the extra 'a' came from a spare set of letters). 

 

There's no great mystery to this one: it's an amalgam of microcomputer and software. Although originally it had a hyphen and a capital S, so was spelled Micro-Soft. "It seemed like a law firm or like a consulting company to call it Allen & Gates. So we picked Microsoft even before we had a company to name," Bill Gates told Forbes in 1995. The company was founded in 1975.

According to the biography of Steve Jobs, the name for Apple, which was founded in 1976, was conceived by Jobs after he returned from an apple farm. He apparently thought the name sounded “fun, spirited and not intimidating”. The name also benefitted by beginning with an "A", which meant it would be nearer the front of any listings. So even though he and his colleagues went through many more ideas, they kept returning to Apple, which stuck.

Contrary to popular belief, software maker Adobe Systems, founded in 1982, didn’t get its name from adobe – a building material made of sand, sandy clay and straw. Instead it was the name of a creek that runs through Los Altos Hills, Los Altos and Palo Alto in California. Both Adobe’s founders lived right next to the creek in Palo Alto and they decided to call their company after it.

QVC, the American television network and flagship shopping channel, is an acronym for "Quality Value Convenience". Founded in 1986, QVC broadcasts to more than 350 million households in seven countries.

Jeff Bezos originally incorporated the company as Cadabra, Inc. but when his lawyer misheard the word as "cadaver", he realised it wasn’t going to work. Bezos came up with the name Amazon, founding the company in 1994, reasoning that it was "exotic and different", just like his business. The Amazon river was the biggest in the world, and he planned to make his store the world's largest. Plus, he realised that a company name beginning with "A" would make it to the top of alphabetised lists, which were popular in the early days of the internet. 

Back in 1994, Yahoo! started life as Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web, after co-founder Jerry Yang. He and David Filo soon renamed it Yahoo!, an acronym of "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle". The use of "hierarchical" referred to the fact that the site's database was arranged in various subcategories, while "oracle" was supposed to mean "source of truth and wisdom", and "officious" was supposed to refer to the office workers that used the database.

The name "eBay" comes from the domain the founder Pierre Omidyar used for his site. His company, founded in 1995, was originally named Echo Bay, and the "eBay AuctionWeb" was originally just one part of Echo Bay's website at ebay.com. The site quickly became popular and in 1997 Omidyar changed AuctionWeb's, and his company's, name to eBay, which is what people had been calling the site for a long time anyway.

In the late 1990s Larry Page and Sergey Brin were working on a search engine called BackRub. Realising it was a poor name, they got help from friend Sean who suggested the word googolplex. Googolplex means 10 to the power of googol, and googol means 10 to the power of 100. Larry liked "googol" and Sean, getting the spelling wrong, searched to see if the domain google.com was available. Larry liked the new word Sean had accidentally come up with, so in August 1998, after receiving a $100,000 investment, the company was born.

The now-ubiquitous online payment service started life in 1998, when founders Max Levchin and Peter Thiel created a mobile money transfer company called Field Link. This name didn’t last long, and the company was renamed Confinity, with its electronic transfer service aspect named PayPal in reference to “paying your pal”. Roughly a year after launching, the company merged with Elon Musk’s X.com Corporation and decided to focus solely on the PayPal aspect of the business – hence the name Confinity was dropped.

In 1999, two British men started a fashion business which copied clothes worn by popular celebrities. The name ASOS is actually an acronym for "As Seen On Screen". By 2001, the website was officially www.asos.co.uk, and the AsSeenOnScreen name had well and truly gone. In 2003, everybody agreed that ASOS was the name by which customers should recognise the company, and it was formally changed on the legal documents. The brand has since branched away from copying celebrities for its designs.

The freemium communication service Skype was created in 2003. Unlike other similar services, Skype is a hybrid peer-to-peer and client-server system. The founders wanted its name to reflect this. Initially, they called it ‘Sky Peer-to-Peer’. But it’s not exactly the easiest name to remember or spell and wasn't the fun name they'd hoped for. So they eliminated the “to-peer” ending, which shortened it to Skyper, but as skyper.com was already registered they simply removed the "r".

One of the social media company’s co-founders Jack Dorsey came up with the idea for the platform during a day-long brainstorming session. The original name was “Status”, but after searching through the dictionary he found the word Twitter. The definition was “a short burst of inconsequential information, and chirps from birds”. That’s exactly what the product was. Inspired by flickr, Dorsey initially called it “twttr” but later changed it back to Twitter for simplicity. The company was founded in 2006.

It’s the largest subscription music streaming service in the world. But do you know how Spotify got its name? According to a Quora response by co-founder Daniel Ek, in April 2006 he and fellow co-founder Martin Lorentzon were brainstorming ideas for the company, when Ek misheard one of Lorentzon’s ideas as Spotify. They liked the name so registered the domain just minutes later, although the pair admitted they were embarrassed by its accidental origins and told people that it’d been conceived as a combination of “spot” and “identify”.

When Kevin Systrom began creating the app that would eventually become Instagram, it was initially called Burbn, in a nod to Systrom’s favourite drink, bourbon. Yet when they began to streamline the original app – which had been focused on location sharing – and started to emphasise the photo-sharing element, they decided to give it a different name. Instagram is supposed to combine the words “instant camera” and “telegram”; it was chosen because it’s easy to pronounce and spell.

Now read about the humble beginnings of the world's biggest businesses