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As with a lot of IKEA product names, this references what the product is: 'bygg' is 'build', and 'lek' is 'play'.

Lek also refers to LEGO which is short for danish leg godt (play well)

lek (Swedish) = leg (Danish), so lek is short for leg godt in the same sense play is short for play well ;)

It is also one of those cases where one word in English becomes two words in a different language. Play as in playing a video game, or chess, or something similar, is called "spela", while play as children do is called "leka".

This is an interesting pair, as both leke/lege/leka and spille/spela apparently comes from proto-Germanic, but via Norse (leikr) for the former and German (spelen/spielen) respectively.

Interestingly Old English apparently has "lac" which belongs to the former group, while "play" is also of Germanic origin, but derived from words implying moving about and being engaged in rather than directly from the more specific Germanic words for play.

When I looked it up I expected to see one of the more usual examples when there are pairs like this of one Norse/Germanic source and one imported and bastardised from latin or a romance language.

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