Things unexpectedly named after people (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Things unexpectedly named after people (2020)

notes.rolandcrosby.com

354 pointsprawn333 comments

The generic Hungarian word for trash cans, 'kuka', unexpectedly originates from the names of German industrialists Johann Josef Keller and Jakob Knappich.

The story is quite involved, to the extent that one would be tempted to dismiss it as a folk etymology, if it wasn't ridiculously well-attested.

Keller and Knappich founded an acetylene factory in Augsburg, Bavaria in 1898. They named it Keller und Knappich Augsburg (KUKA).

Their venture quickly expanded into manufacturing of welding equipment, household appliances, and eventually car parts and heavy industrial robots. In the 1920s, they manufactured hoppers for Hungarian municipal garbage trucks, which they stamped prominently with their logo.

This led to refuse trucks being known colloquially referred to as "kukás auto" (lit. "car with KUKA written on it"), even long after KUKA stopped manufacturing those hoppers. And the noun kuka, referring to trash cans, arose as a backformation from there! And this is how two German industrialist gave their names to Hungarian trash cans. Of course, it probably helped that a word kuka existed in the Hungarian language already at that point (as an unrelated adjective referring to a mute person), much like snowflake existed before Snow and Flake founded the town.

Funny enough, the French word for a garbage can is also named after someone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Poubelle the prefect who made the use of garbage containers mandatory in Paris.

Continuing with the trend, the Polish word for outhouse is sławojka, named after Felicjan Sławoj Składkowski, a prime minister who is responsible for making them mandatory in the countryside in the 1920s, and apparently touring the country to check how sanitary they are. https://pl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C5%82awojka

Pretty much the same can be said in Italian about public urinals and the emperor Vespasian(o).

Interesting, it seems to be the same KUKA that know produces robots

Interesting that this occured during the k.u.k. monarchy.

Don’t google kuk(a) in Sweden

Incidentally, 'kuk' is a Norwegian word, a somewhat pejorative synonym for 'penis', but almost as versatile as the four-letter word - it can be used as an adjective, a verb, an adverb, a noun etc.

Saying that 'something is kuka/kuket' means it is messed up beyond repair.

Even as I approach my fifties, I have to stifle a chuckle every time I see a KUKA robot. Kids never really grow up, I guess.

As for things named after people, the probably most prominent example in Norwegian today is the so-called 'Brustadbu', named after former minister of children and families, Sylvia Brustad.

The government she was in introduced a new law governing opening hours for convenience stores, effectively barring stores above 100sqm (1,100 sqft) from being open on Sundays.

Predictably, this gave rise to a lot of stores measuring 99.9sqm, colloquially referred to as 'Brustadbu'/'Brustad sheds'.

Kuka in Croatian means "hook" so at least their robotic arms are somewhat aptly named.

incidentally, "kuka" (or actually "kúka") means to poop in icelandic

Interesting! "Kuki" in Hungarian is a children's word for penis. I assume it's a nickname for "kukac", meaning worm/maggot (which, btw, is the same word we use for the @ symbol).

Kuk = Cock, surely

The most common word in Japanese for “stapler” is hochikisu or hotchikisu, which seems to come from the name of the E.F. Hotchkiss Company [1], an American manufacturer whose staplers were imported to Japan in the early 20th century. Some Japanese sources [2] say that the word comes from Benjamin Hotchkiss [3], an inventor of machine guns, and that is what I learned many years ago, but that etymology apparently has not been documented [4].

[1] https://connecticutmills.org/find/details/e.h.-hotchkiss-co

[2] https://gally.net/temp/20240222hotchikisugogensetsu.jpg

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_B._Hotchkiss

[4] https://wis.max-ltd.co.jp/about/company/trivia/h_story/inven...

More: https://jisho.org/forum/5d132f2ed5dda71944000054-origin-of-n...

In Switzerland, we call staplers Bostitch, which happens to be the name of an US company that (used to or still does) manufacture them.

X rays are called Rentogen in Japanese, after Wilhelm Röntgen, who produced/detected them first.

Same in Czech, tbh it's possible that English is the outlier here

English is definitely not an outlier. In french it's Rayon X

I had a moment to check and it’s actually interesting - looks like the world is split in two. Looking at a few languages closer to home (for me) we have:

X-ray-like: English, Spanish, Italian, French, Romanian, Turkish, Portuguese

Röntgen-like: German, Danish, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Czech, Polish, Russian, Hungarian

There’s way more of each than I’ve listed, of course. I just picked a few languages

X-Strahlen (X-Rays) is the name Röntgen invented for his discovery :)

People in Turkey definitely don't use X-ray, they use Röntgen. Same for Azerbaijan.

X rays are called Röntgen rays in German, which is where the Japanese got it from, like many medical terms.

"Sabiro" for a suit comes from "Savile Row", a street in London famous for its tailor shops, which in turn is named after Dorothy Boyle, Countess of Burlington and Cork (née Savile).

The story continues in the Netherlands, where a company licensed the Keller and Knappich design to produce their own trucks. Of course, they released it under their own names: Klinkenberg & Koster, abbreviated as KLIKO, which they too stamped in large font on their trucks and bins. And today "kliko" is the common Dutch name for the wheelie bin.

I guess only in those parts of the country where Kliko had a large market share at some point. The Otto brand name is so strong in the east that they have no idea what a Kliko is.

Continuing the trash theme, "Dumpster" comes from the Dempster family name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dempster_Brothers

In Switzerland, there is a company Ochsner, which also manufactured the household bins to go with the hoppers, and patented that. Those bins became mandatory in quite a bunch of municipalities.

Eventually, garbage sacks were introduced like everywhere else, the bins became obsolete, though I still see hoppers from them, so they still make those.

Long story short, the bins (called "Ochsnerchübu") are gone, but the madness of patenting a freaking trashcan resulted in one of Switzerland's most successful bands having named themselves "Patent Ochsner".

This happened in Poland with long-haul trucks, which we often call tiry (plural of tir), with TIR being an abbreviation for "Transports Internationaux Routiers"[1], an international treaty covering the transport of goods by road. Vehicles using the provisions of this treaty must have a plate with TIR written on it, and so the world entered popular usage.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIR_Convention

Main Street in San Francisco was named after Charles Main.

https://mountainviewpeople.blogspot.com/2007/09/charles-main...

Here are some more interesting ones...

* Mason jar was named after John Landis Mason, 19th century American tinsmith

* Guppy (fish) was named after Robert John Lechmere Guppy, 19th century British naturalist

* Silhouette was named after Étienne de Silhouette, 18th century French politican

* Bloomers (women's clothing) was named after Amelia Bloomer, 19th century American women's right advocate

* T&T Supermarket (Canadian supermarket chain) was named after Tina and Tiffany, daughters of the founder, Cindy Lee

* Bluetooth was named after Harald Bluetooth, 10th century king of Denmark

Things NOT named after people:

* "Aberration" has nothing to do with Ernst Abbe, optics scientist who wrote about chromatic aberrations. It comes from the Latin root.

>Main Street in San Francisco was named after Charles Main.

I feel this might be a bit of a cheeky urban legend, or at the very least a coincidence.

"Main st" has been used in western city's and towns for a lot longer than SF has been around.

San Francisco’s “Main Street” is in no way a major artery, however. Market Street served that function.

Here’s an 1853 map https://rumsey.geogarage.com/maps/g3463000.html in which today’s Main Street is only a block long. The map calls it Front St, although there’s another Front St nearby which kept the name – perhaps it was renamed Main to disambiguate once the streets connected?

I worked on Main for years and nobody mentioned this urban legend. while the street is not long, I would not put it past bureaucrats to name a random street Main

That map also showcases another example of this - Townsend Street is named after one James Townsend, who was the alcalde [1] in 1848, not for its location at the end of town. (Geary, Leavenworth, and Bryant are also named for pre-statehood alcaldes, but their names are less amusingly coincidental.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcalde

Ooohh, so 1st St made sense back then. I always wondered why SF needed like a -4th St.

Or done in the first place for the sake of the double meaning

It could (conceivably) be that "in San Francisco" is meant literally, and that in San Francisco it's true, even if not the case for other instances of "Main Street" elsewhere, however; a cursory web search leads me to think "urban legend" is by far the more likely. It's always been my understanding that "Main Street" either is currently, or was at some time nearer the town / city's beginning the main street that went through "downtown".

It is literally true specifically for San Francisco. The street now named Main in San Francisco didn't exist for the first few decades after the city's founding and grid-laying (it was underwater, just off shore in San Francisco Bay!), and at no point has it been a street of any particular prominence.

> at no point has it been a street of any particular prominence

It’s a good street, Brent.

(There’s actually good motorcycle parking just off Market I used to use all the time when I worked downtown.)

Yes, but the Main St. in San Francisco hasn't been around nearly as long as SF has. When the downtown grids were laid out, what's now Main St. was underwater. It didn't exist as land, let alone a road that was either significant or central. By the time it was filled in, it was home to Charles Main's mining provision shop.

The other way you can tell that it's not "main" is that it's parallel to 1st Street. Most cities don't have both a Main and a 1st, they have one or the other (which is why "Second Street" is the second-most common street name in the United States behind "Main", with "First" coming in third place). If SF were using Main in the "normal" sense, it would be where 1st is, next to 2nd. Failing that, it would at least be the next block over from 1st, so that 1st was counting from it. Washington, DC, sort of works that way, where there's a "zero street" (North/South Capitol), and then 1st is the next block over. But... SF's Main St. is a full three blocks from 1st. It's just kind of in the middle of nowhere, logically speaking. And that's again because of the landfill situation - 1st St. is the first full block counting from the shoreline at the time the streets were built.

In the heart of the Georgian city of Bath we have 3 streets designed by the architect John Wood.

The streets are named Quiet St, John St and Wood St. It is claimed that the naming of these streets is based on the 3 words most regularly used in the clearly passionate council meetings of the time.

Might have been named after Shinzo Abe.

Was it that bad of a pun? Figured a politician like Abe would have quite a few Abe-rants…

"Silhouette" was a surprise when I'd learned of it a few years back.

The backstory: he was a financial minister and an advocate of austerity, such that when the practice of creating simple, cheap, shadow-profile head portraits of people emerged, his name was applied to them.

This one is a bit too niche but I love it:

In Quebec, there is a tax one pays to your municipality upon the purchase of a house called the "Taxe de Bienvenue". This translates to "Welcome Tax", which it commonly is called by anglos.

Many clever folks might overhear you call it that and say "Welll actuuallyy it is named after a minister by the name of Jean Bienvenue, and so that translation is incorrect".

Well, it turns out that's actually incorrect, and was mistakenly repeated by a local newspaper.

A case of "things unexpectedly not unexpectedly named after a person".

https://www.journaldequebec.com/2017/12/15/lex-ministre-jean...

Well yeah, I guess the perverse naming (having to pay a tax isn't really likely to make you feel welcome) led people to look for alternative explanations...

Haha yah, it's always felt sardonic.

But is it perverse naming? It seems functional to me. It's (a flowery way of) describing the thing you're paying for through the tax: the costs associated with onboarding you into the municipal government systems associated with home-owner record keeping — i.e. the costs of "welcoming" you.

Ticketmaster has "convenience fees" — if you don't pay them, you don't get "convenience." Well, if you don't pay the "welcome" tax, then you won't get "welcomed" (i.e. made able to live there.)

(I guess maybe it's intuitive to me because I see municipalities as private corporations like any other, that have ultimate authority on whether people get to live on their incorporated land. By default, you're not "welcome" to own land in a city! The city has to decide that!)

This reminds me of two (that I'm aware of, there may be more) street names in Munich that appear to be named after places but are actually named after people named after places: Passauerstraße (named after the leader of a peasant uprising rather than the city Passau) and Dessauerstraße (named after https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_I,_Prince_of_Anhalt-De... rather than the city Dessau) - the only clue being that streets named after places, e.g. Aachener Straße, are written with a space in the name (or rather should be, but lots of people already get this rule wrong), while streets named after people are written as one word or with dashes. Needless to say, the likelihood of these street names being spelled wrong is even higher, including in a very prominent (and expensive to fix) place: an illuminated street sign in a tunnel https://www.merkur.de/lokales/muenchen/sendling-westpark-ort... - it's hard to see in the photo, but the letters are made of individual LEDs, so correcting the mistake would basically require building a new sign.

Also Gärtnerplatz, named after the famed architect Friedrich von Gärtner.

Fun fact: The Gärtnerplatz is located on the street Klenzestraße, which is named after the other famous architect and von Gärtner's rival, Leo von Klenze.

Algorithms: Named after Al-Khwarizmi

Algebra: Named after his book, Al-jabr.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Khwarizmi

That first one sounds so much like a folky, jokey etymology, and yet, it’s true…

Given the existence of “logarithms”, it’s doubly surprising…hey, why are they called that?

Wikipedia says “Napier coined the term for logarithm in Middle Latin, "logarithmus," derived from the Greek, literally meaning, "ratio-number," from logos "proportion, ratio, word" + arithmos "number".”

I'm not going to argue against Knuth on that.

No, algorithms are named after Al Gore.

No, an Al-Gore-ithm is one of his nuggets of wisdom when repeated by someone with a lisp

(write "You are hearing me talk.")

A few German companies:

- Aldi (supermarket chain), founded by the Albrecht brothers, thus ALbrecht DIskont

- Adidas, founded by ADolf DASsler

- Mercedes-Benz, named by Emil Jellinek-Mercedes after his daughter Mercedes, initially with Daimler which then merged with Benz

- Audi, founded by August Horch. Initially founded as _A. Horch & Cie. Motorwagenwerke Zwickau_, he later lost the rights to the name "Horch". He named his new company "Audi", which is a translation of his name into Latin: in German, "horch" is the imperative for "horchen" (to listen), which maps to "audi" as the imperative for "audire" in Latin

And then there are a just a ton of companies named after their founders (Porsche, Bosch, Siemens, …) but I'm not sure if these count :)

I sometimes feel that German founders are too stuck on naming their company after themself, some of them really should have looked for alternatives, e.g. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppelfricke

I don't see the connection to German founders there, as many small / medium sized businesses like the one you linked are called after their founders everywhere (plumbers, printers, electricians,...)

It’s generally the result of them starting as personal or family businesses, so initially your brand is your name. Then the business grows so large the relationship inverts. It does not have much to do with germany really, it’s common the world over.

For example, just from US car brand, you obviously have Ford, but also Olds (Ransom E.), Chevrolet (Louis and Arthur), Buick (David), Chrystler (Walter), Dodge (Horace Elgin and John Francis), …

And I can’t fault a German industrialist from 1910 for not English-proofing his business.

It's not the lack of English-proofing, it's the connotations that this name has for Germans: "Sepp" is a very common and not really glamourous first name/nickname, and "frickeln" means tinkering or fiddling around with something (usually with the negative sense of tinkering rather than fixing it properly).

How long has it been like this though? The meaning of words change surprisingly quickly, but not as quickly as their second-order connotations.

Fun fact: It was originally legally mandated that if you form a business, it just be named after you.

Many do. The founders of Lidl bought the name from someone named Lidl. They were named Schwarz.

Rudolf let his greatest opportunity slide when he named his company Puma instead of Rudidas.

You can certainly argue that Adolf's diminutive has been used for Adidas: ADI DASsler.

I believe that's the case, it also settled any arguments over pronunciation - it's not A-dee-das as I used to think!

It seems like these are different than the ones in the website. These are not really "unexpected" in the way that "PageRank", which is an algorithm for ranking pages, turns out not to be names after the pages it ranks, but the Page that invented it.

The examples in your post are just the source of these names, which may be unknown to many, but are not unexpected.

I was quite surprised to discover the source of the names of British supermarket chains Tesco and Waitrose.

Waitrose is a contraction of "Waite, Rose & Taylor" Tesco is the combination of a supplier's name, with the founder's (Jack Cohen) name. They also have a "Jack's" brand.

A few more examples:

King Street in Hammersmith, London, was named after John King, Bishop of London in 17th century. [0]

Neanderthals were named after Joachim Neumann, a 17th century clergyman and composer who Latinised his surname to Neander (both literally meaning "new man"). He particularly loved a certain valley near Düsseldorf, so much in fact that it was renamed "Neandert(h)al" after him. [1]

Sideburns, a once popular style of male facial hair, was named after the Union general Ambrose Burnside. [2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_King_(bishop_of_London)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neandertal_(valley)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambrose_Burnside

> Latinised

probably Greekicized

Excellent point! In fact it's both - "neo" from Latin and "ander" from Greek. And I stand corrected on another point: it was actually his grandfather who changed the name, so our Joachim actually was born Neander.

Um actually, neo is Greek as well. (Latin would be some form of nov-.)

But NeoVim is from Greek and Latin mixed. ;)

Surely Neanderthals were named after Neandertal where they were first discovered, but Neandertal itself was named after Mr. Neander?

At the opposite end of things, here's Stigler's law of eponymy[0]. This "law" states that no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.

It was discovered by Robert K. Merton.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy

Thank you for this, it made me genuinely chuckle

Is this a little like how all famous Germans are Austrian, and all famous French are Belgian?

The two most famous Belgians are fictitious:

  Hercule Poirot, Tintin

Unless you are a cyclist, then the most famous Belgian is:

  Eddie Merckx

Excluding the unmentionable infamous King Leopold II, of course.

But Belgium has only existed since 1839, so it has a limited run.

You might think Morgan Hill, California was named because of a prominent feature of the landscape. Nope, named after a guy named Morgan Hill.

(And the hill you see in Morgan Hill, CA is actually named El Toro — the Spanish word for "lawnmower". Thank you very much ladies and gentlemen, I'll be here for one more night.)

One might think that Menlo Park, California was founded after the one made famous by Edison in New Jersey, but amazingly it's the other way around.

Via Wikipedia:

In 1876, Thomas Edison set up his home and research laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, at the time an unsuccessful real estate development named after the town of Menlo Park, California.

Years later, part of Menlo Park, NJ was renamed “Edison, NJ” in honor of Thomas Edison.

Ofc, California didn’t adopt a similar change.

Edison also had a winter home in Orlando, Florida. And Orlando was NOT founded by George Boole, despite containing both substrings "or" and "and" (but not "not").

What is the relationship between the word "toro" (bull in Spanish) and lawnmowers?

This site [1] claims to be a Spanish dictionary and it doesn't agree, it claims the word is "la cortadora de césped".

I guess it's possible that the word has become a generic trademark [2] like Kleenex, since of course (?) Toro [3] is a brand of lawnmowers and other equipment.

Edit: switching Toro's site to Spanish [4] shows that they at least use the term consistent with [1], which seems to add credibility. :)

[1]: https://www.spanishdict.com/translate/lawnmower

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark

[3]: https://www.toro.com/en

[4]: https://www.toro.com/es-es/homeowner/walk-behind-mowers

Spanish and English usually merge in fun, unpredictable ways. In certain parts of Andalusia people refer to electrical drills as "el guarrito" (the little pig). Turns out it's because there was a drill brand called "Warrington", hence the mix.

Nice, that would be a plausible explanation.

Just for fun, here's the definition of "toro" in Spanish-speaking countries [1]:

- Bull. - Strong, well-built man. - Forklift. - (In plural) Bullfight.

- Trim (as in a trim part of a car bodywork). - Torus.

[1] https://dle.rae.es/toro

Sounds to me like a joke. As in: bulls eat grass.

> El Toro — the Spanish word for "lawnmower"

Not even close!

They're just being cheeky. Toro is also a brand of lawnmower.

I thought the lawnmower's Spanish name was "Jesus"?

My mother's family has lived in Morgan Hill for over a century, and I've been there often. It always bothered me when I was a little boy that El Toro was not in fact called "Morgan Hill", and that none of the local hills were Morgan Hill.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/legg-calve-pe...

Leg calve perthes disease is named after doctors legg and calve. It presented (for me) as pain in my calf, and I spelled it wrong for 5 years.

Lol, and you're still going...

Thanks, mobile autocorrect

I thought the Pap Test was an acronym (PAP) but it's actually named after the physician that invented it, Papanicolaou: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pap_test

The test is known as papanicolau in my country, but so many people think it's named after one of the ancient popes called Nikolaus ("papa Nicolau")...

Because medieval popes were know for their expert use of the speculum?

German chocolate cake, per Wikipedia, "Originating in the United States, it was named after English-American chocolate maker Samuel German".

I learned this earlier today! My favorite desert too.

Funnily enough I know this desert by its translated name to Hungarian as "Német csokoládé torta".

Székely káposzta and Dobos torta are missing from that list.

I exclaimed out loud when I read about MySQL. I never liked the name before, and now I do.

And MariaDB is named after her sister.

And MaxDb is named after her brother

Now I’m curious about MongoDb

MongoDB only pawn in game of life.

Santa Maria!

... and they have an OnlyFans?

Same here. I always thought it was lazy naming, like "My" + some topic. Now I respect the name.

Oh it's the Finnish girl's name, like Little My from the Moomins. That is definitely an improvement, reading it as the possessive pronoun makes it look like the name of some pushy preinstalled crapware. YourSQLExperience. EnjoyData. MyCloudStorageIDidntAskFor.

Well, there is even more to it.

First of all the name My is (Finland-)Swedish, the Finnish name of the character is Pikku Myy.

The Finnish name registry contains only ~2 mentions before the publication of the hugely popular first Moomin book (and none for Myy) so this girls' name and hence the name in the MySQL really comes from the Moomin stories.

And finally, the name of Little My is a play on the Greek small letter mu, i.e. μ, and you'd be closer to the real idea and original pronunciation if you thought of it as MuSQL (μSQL) instead ;)

One guy named Lucene (db behind Elasticsearch) after wife's middle name and Hadoop after his kid's elephant toy.

I wonder what is proper pronunciation.

It seems to be Swedish in origin, in which case the closest English equivalent would be "mee" or "mew".

Roughly speaking, the <y> here is close to what is traditionally transcribed in English as [i:], except rounded, i.e. [y:].

Many caveats apply, this probably being Finnish Swedish (which should have the same or a similar vowel), my Swedish being rather rudimentary, etc.

I think one of the most unexpected words in English to be named for a person is "guy"! From Guy Fawkes. The word went from meaning an effigy of Fawkes, to any doll, to a person.

I'm very surprised to see this so late in the thread

Bridgestone, the Japanese tire manufacturer, is named after its founder, Shojiro Ishibashi. His surname means “stone bridge”.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgestone

Firestone is from Harvey S. Firestone though. Interesting that two companies with similar names had different origins, yet one would acquire the other many years later.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestone_Tire_and_Rubber_Co...

Ford Charcoal was made from recycled Model T scrap lumber and sold in Ford dealerships. It was bought out in the 50s and renamed to Kingsford Charcoal after the name of the town where the plant was located (the town named after Henry Ford's cousin who helped supply the lumber to Henry Ford).

(Another fun fact, the charcoal process was developed by none other than Thomas Edison)

Last part: Woah, I was surprised!

> Thomas Edison designed the briquette factory

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsford_(charcoal)

It took me too long to find out that Larry named PageRank after himself and not after ranking web pages.

And I was horrified when I learned that lynching is named after someone, and a perpetrator at that.

Whereas boycott is named after the target of one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Boycott

Interesting, because it highlights that from the beginning boycotts were morally fraught, and even the first (?) boycott involved violence against non-participants.

Having mentioned boycotts, I'm fairly sure I learned both on the same day. Did we both read the same hackernews link a few years ago?

The burpee exercise is named after the US physiologist Royal Huddleston Burpee Sr.

I know y’all want to fact-check this – I sure did when I heard it the first time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burpee_(exercise)

The Mackintosh is named after Charles Macintosh, inventor of the modern waterproof raincoat.

The Macintosh is named indirectly after John McIntosh, a Canadian farmer and apple breeder of Scottish descent, who gave his name to the McIntosh Red cultivar.

The Mackintosh building of the Glasgow School of Art is named after Charles Rennie Mackintosh, born McIntosh.

5061 McIntosh is named after Bruce McIntosh, a Canadian astronomer.

Indiana Jones was named after George Lucas's dog

He was originally going to be called Indiana Smith but Spielberg didn’t like the name.

> Indiana Jones was named after George Lucas's dog

Acually he's also named after a dog "in-universe":

SALLAH: Please... What does it always mean, this... this "Junior?"

HENRY: That's his name. Henry Jones, Junior.

INDY: I like Indiana.

HENRY: We named the dog Indiana.

BRODY: May we go home now, please?

SALLAH (to Indy): The dog!? (laughs) You are named after the dog...

INDY (embarrassed): I've got a lot of fond memories of that dog.

(https://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/Indiana%20Jones%20And%20...)

One of my favorites is that the creator of Pilates was a guy named Joe Pilates. It’s like if the inventor of yoga was named Vivek Yoga (which is not the case, to be clear.)

Although Bikram Yoga is named after this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikram_Choudhury

It would've been so on brand for Bikram to change his last name to "Yoga." I'm honestly disappointed he didn't.

I think I was an adult when I heard the term Pilates.. why would it be intriguing, if his name were Brethorst people would be saying "Let's do you Brethorst exercises!"

Words are weird

Whereas the founder of the male dance review Chippendales was named Suman (pronounced "Show-man") Bannerjee

While we're at it, both of the S'es in "Einstein-Bose" should be pronounced "sh", so the particle class should be pronounced "Boshons".

And not Pontius

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontius_Pilate

I would love to open a Pilates studio near Amazon's Seattle headquarters on Pontius Ave. I'd call it Pontius Pilates, of course. https://www.writesofway.org/pontius-avenue-n/

My favourite is the verb mesmerize, which is named after physician Franz Mesmer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Mesmer

Tantalizing: something you really want but probably cannot get.

...named after Tantalus, the son of Zeus who was condemned to stand in water under a fruit tree, but the fruit and water were always just out of reach. He had a daughter, Niobe, and son, Pelops.

Tantalum, the material, was named because it could not be easily dissolved in any acid, unlike most other metals. Despite knowing of the element's existence, researchers could not isolate the chemical in tantalite samples for decades, as it was always bound to this other material---later called niobium, although one guy thought there were two or more other metals and wanted to call the other one pelopium. Nope; all niobium!

Sadly, tantalum became something of a semi-professional metal outside of capacitors, and even there ceramics and aluminums are preferred for one reason or another---usually cost. It was good for bulb filaments until tungsten displaced it. It was great for fountain pen nibs but not as great as iridium and osmium. It doesn't help with alloying because it embrittles. Other biologically inert materials are usually chosen over tantalum for implants. It could be a refractory ceramic but tantalum carbide is not as heat resistant as hafnium carbide.

It also has weird nuclear properties, where someone will probably look back in a the distant future and remark, "damn, that awesome commercial application of nuclear tantalum evaded us for centuries! What a fitting name!"

I never connected until just now that I should probably avoid breathing in any of the magic smoke when a tantalum capacitor explodes.

Not quite the same, but the city of Washington, DC is named after George Washington, whose family hails from the town of Washington in northeast England.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington,_Tyne_and_Wear

Cincinnati, Ohio is also named after George Washington, albeit indirectly. https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2022/09/06/who-was-cin...

I didn't know that George was Geordie.

But Georgetown, part of Washington, isn’t named for him - it predates his rise. It’s named either for King George II or for its founders, two guys named George. I guess George was a very common name back then.

George was such a common name that we have a state of Georgia.

Which isn't named after the country Georgia, or George III whom George Washington rebelled against, but rather George II, his grandfather.

I live in Georgia and this did not occur to me.

The Haribo candies are named after their founder and the location (HAns RIegel + BOnn)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haribo

Is the Müsliriegel also named after him?

Orcas Island, Washington. Not named after Orca whales. Named after Juan Vicente de Güemes Padilla Horcasitas y Aguayo, 2nd Count of Revillagigedo, the Viceroy of New Spain who sent an exploration expedition under Francisco de Eliza to the Pacific Northwest in 1791.

Does "Git" count? ;-) (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git#Naming)

Angel Falls, the world's tallest uninterrupted waterfall, is named after Jimmie Angel, a U.S. aviator, who was the first person to fly over the falls.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_Falls

One that surprised me recently: Coriolis force. I think I'd always assumed it was some latin-derived term to do with curling or curving, but no: named for Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis.

I learned this in school when we finally had a teacher who read it with the french accent rather then the Italian/latin one (stress on last I rather then second O).

Mispronunciation of words I've only read has been the bane of my life.

> stress on last I rather then second O

Although one can stress a word in a sentence (prosodic stress) e.g for emphasis (contrast stress) there's no such thing as stressed syllables (tonic accent) in spoken french.

That's mostly why we native french people have a hard time speaking languages where stressed syllables matter and produces different phonemes for identically written syllables: the typical frenglish output is very monotonic and uniform. Combine that with the lack of back-of-throat Rs and tip-of-the-tongue TH which don't occur in french and you get your archetypal frenglish. And it's tough to learn because not only we're ill equipped by practice to produce those (proprioception and muscle strength) we also have a hard time hearing them as well, so we map those to french R and Z.

Conversely for someone whose native language is accented it's hard to understand that french completely lacks these, so the only way to think of how written-french syllables sound when read is that every syllable is accented, uniformly so.

The Gardenia flower is named after Akexander Garden

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Garden_(naturalist)

Thomas Crapper sold an improved toilet with his name marked on them, which were popular in England. US soldiers stationed there started referring to toilets as "the crapper", possibly because in the US "crap" still meant "refuse", a specific sort of which was ingested by the crapper. [1]

The toilet is also called the "john" because John Harrington invented the first flushing toilet in Britain. [2]

In British usage, "to hoover" means "to vacuum [e.g. a carpet]" or "to suck up as if by a vacuum cleaner" (e.g. "tech companies hoover up as much user data as they can"). Murray Spangler, a janitor, invented a vacuum cleaner to avoid aggravating his asthma while cleaning. W. H. Hoover bought his patent and founded the Hoover company, which sold the devices which hoovered the dirt. [3]

[1] https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2011/05/why-the-toi...

[2] https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2010/08/why-the-toi...

[3] https://hoover.com/pages/about-hoover

Here's an interesting example: in the Whoniverse there is this concept of a "deadlock seal", which is kind of a lock which is almost impossible to break (it is (in)famously resistant even to sonic devices, which is a big deal). Apparently, it was named after an Arthur Deadlock (https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Deadlock_seal).

I can only assume this is a deliberate joke of the authors, of course.

The teddy bear was named after Theodore Roosevelt (The president of the USA), after saving a baby bear during a hunting expedition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teddy_bear)

"Saving" makes it sound like the bear survived, which is not what actually happened:

> A suite of Roosevelt's attendants, led by Holt Collier, cornered, clubbed, and tied an American black bear to a willow tree after a long exhausting chase with hounds. They called Roosevelt to the site and suggested that he shoot it [...] Roosevelt refused to shoot the bear himself, deeming this unsportsmanlike, but instructed that the bear be killed to put it out of its misery

Oh, here's one: UC Irvine is named after the Irvine family, who named the university. The city was then named afterwards after because it didn't even exist at the time.

> Price Club (Sol Price)

I wonder how much this was a "thing unexpectedly named after a person" vs. a case of nominative determinism.

If my last name were Price, I tell you, from the moment I understood the potential implications, I'd be vaguely considering becoming an entrepreneur and starting a business focused on low prices in some way or another — just so I could make the pun.

I've driven the Outerbridge Crossing probably hundreds of times. That one is blowing my mind.

Context for non-New Yorkers: Outerbridge is the southernmost bridge in NYC and New York State, and Staten Island might as well be on Mars for the rest of the city. So the name "Outerbridge" is all the more fitting (and surprising).

The George Washington Bridge and Outerbridge Crossing both connect New York City (on the east) with New Jersey (on the west) but are about 45 minutes apart, even with no traffic.

The other NYC bridges are all (I think?) named Bridge, but they went with Crossing here because Outerbridge Bridge sounds weird.

Another NYC one: A lot of people think "major" in The Major Deegan Expressway means it is a significant expressway, but actually the expressway is named after (Army) Major William Deegan

Maybe I'm weird but I think NYC area has numerous semi-poetic sounding roads (while most of the country just uses route numbers): Harlem River Drive, Cross Bronx, Major Deegan, Van Wyck, Belt Parkway, Grand Central Parkway, the Taconic, Palisades Parkway, the B.Q.E., the Sprain Brook. Plus the Verrazano and Tappan Zee.

Houston does the same with its highways, and, in fact, they have different names depending on their relation to downtown. For example, I-45 is both the Gulf Freeway and North Freeway, 59 is both Eastex and Southwest.

Austin also has named highways (Mopac, Capital of Texas, Research), except I-35, which I was once told was because "it was the only one not created locally."

Interestingly for New Yorkers, what you might think is the West Cross Parkway is actually named after Wilbur Cross.

For those not in the area: it is literally the last bridge one that waterway before you reach the Atlantic Ocean.

The outer-most bridge!

The fact that it is named after the first PANYNJ president (Mr. Outerbridge) is amazing.

It’s like discovering that “Last Gas Station for 40 miles” is owned by Mr. Laststationfortymiles.

IKEA - an acronym for Ingvar Kamprad, Elmtaryd, Agunnaryd (With I.K. being the name of the founder, Elmtaryd being the place he grew up and Agunnaryd being the closest village.)

About southern blot there is more: it's a method used to find a specific DNA sequence in a DNA sample, and was named after its creator.

When a similar method was invented that applies to RNA, was of course named Southern.

When the one for proteins was invented, was named Western.

> When a similar method was invented that applies to RNA, was of course named Southern.

I think you meant Northern :)

Also, there are Eastern blots for PTMs

Terrible nitpick on a delightful list: I disagree that Unilever deserves to be in the list. It’s the merger of Lever Brothers and Boterunie and the combo is a typical corporate word soup. Might as well add PriceWaterhouseCooper otherwise.

Caesar salad after a Mexican chef not the emperor

So I should be pronouncing it Sayzar Salad?

says who?

Keyser Söse.

Shrapnel just sounds right. It’s a word with all kinds of jagged flat pieces of metal.

“mesmerize” also sounds quite right and qualifies for this list (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Mesmer)

onomatopoeia - a word that does not sound like it means a word that sounds like what it means.

tarmac < tar + macadam < macadam < John Loudon McAdam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Loudon_McAdam

And macadamia nuts are named after a different John Macadam (beyond similar names, nothing indicates a close blood relationship)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Macadam

Parenthetically, there is no tarmac at any airport because the rock chips would get blown around and wreck the planes and jet engines.

Ritalin. Leandro Panizzon first synthesized it and named it after his wife, Rita, who used it to treat low blood pressure.

There used to be TV commercials for a piece of fitness equipment called the Ab Doer. It was supposedly created by John Abdo. I’m still not sure but as far as I can tell he was a real guy and that was his real name.

As a teen, I thought the "Coriolis" in "Coriolis force" was a Latin word meaning something like "rotating", I was shocked when I found out it's a person's name.

The color “fuchsia” is named after a guy named Fuchs.

*The Raven

I think technically it's named after the flower, which is named after the guy. Worth noting also that the flower was only discovered and named after him after Leonhart Fuchs had already been dead for 130 years; the color was apparently only named another 160 years after that when someone invented a dye, decided it was the color of fuchsia flowers, and called it fuchsine. And then France won the Battle of Magenta and they renamed the commercial dye made from it 'magenta' in its honor, making TWO surprisingly recent invented color names for the price of one.

More specifically, the color is named after the plant, which is named after the guy.

Boysenberry

The name “Sienna” is named after a color called “Siena” *

* (Also a city and type of rock)

> Smart & Final (Jim Smart, Hildane Final)

Thank you. The “and Final” part always seemed rather dark for a brand name…

French toast - named for Joseph French

Indeed, because the French call it 'pain perdu / lost bread', as in something you do with bread you can't otherwise eat fresh anymore.

I think this cheeky habit of biologists also deserves a mention: naming newly discovered organisms after friends or foes, depending on how they feel about those people at the time. Here is the first of four separate wikipedia pages dedicated to those names:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organisms_named_after_...

saxophone - Adolphe Sax

sadism - the Marquis de Sade

masochism - Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

I don't think you're getting the idea.

What is the idea?

How are these different from e.g. erlang, elo or shrapnel - all featured on the page?

It ain’t! Don’t worry these are good!

"Unexpectedly named after people". Erlang seems to be short for for Ericsson Language, Elo is often misspelled ELO as if it stands for something. Shrapnel is less unexpected.

I swear I correct people about Elo vs ELO two to three times a year.

And yes I am a great party guest!

Saxophone is just as unexpected, other -phone musical terms, like vibraphone, idiophone, membranophone, come with a prefix unrelated to people.

Sadism and masochism - perhaps less unexpected, but no less than shrapnel IMO.

Santorum literally screams eponymous neologism.

Vibra-, idio-, membrano-, aero-, etc. are existing or obvious prefixes. Sax- is not. All I can think of is Saxon, but saxophones are pretty recent, so that doesn't match.

Sousaphone is another -phone that's pretty obviously named after a person. Less well known but still pretty obvious are rothphone, heckelphone, sarrusophone, sudrophone.

All my life, I thought "sadism" had to do with the word "sad"!

In the case of shrapnel I guess I always assumed it was derived from some World War era Germanic word for metal scrap/shards, so that it's just named after a British dude is pretty unexpected to me.

They seem entirely expected, or at least not unexpected. Reading them doesn't lead you to assume some alternate obvious but wrong explanation. Imagine learning (made up example) that the musical triangle was named for it's inventor, "Stuart Triangle".

The main junction in Rome is called GRA, or Grande Raccordo Anulare (great ring junction). The name actually comes from Eugenio Gra, one of its main designers

At some point Monty also said he had /my/ directory on his dev system which when had /sql/ for where what later became MySQL was developed.

It is quite possibly it is both... we often can name things first and when come up with fitting storie later.

MaxDB, MaxScale, MariaDB, Maria (storage engine) though were all named for children... to continue the pattern.

Also https://wiki.debian.org/WhyTheName

The famous British one is Sandwich => Earl of Sandwich.

The online Britannica has an entry on things surprisingly named after people: https://www.britannica.com/story/9-things-you-didnt-know-wer...

I also love places that are named after someone and it's slightly amusing/horrifying.

Harold Holt was the Australian Prime Minister in the 1960's, and went for a swim and went missing (yes, there are many, MANY local conspiracies this :)). So what did we do? Named a swimming pool[0] after him (construction actually started before his death, I believe).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Holt_Memorial_Swimming_...

If any country would commit to humor like this in large public works, it’s Australia

... and the cold war era submarine communications base:

Naval Communication Station Harold E. Holt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Communication_Station_Ha...

    It is generally agreed that Holt's disappearance was a simple case of an accidental drowning, but a number of conspiracy theories surfaced, most famously the suggestion that he was a spy from the People's Republic of China and had been collected by a Chinese submarine.

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Harold_Holt

Sedona, Arizona.

Named for Sedona Schenbly, of Goren, Missouri. She and her husband had moved to Arizona for their health. He wanted to open a Post Office, but the Post Office authorities didn't favor his suggestion of naming it "Schenblyville Station." Thankfully, he chose to name it after his wife.

Not surprising, not a good example of this phenomenon.

-self-elected policeman of it

I was surprised to learn that Cakebread Cellars is actually named for its founders, Jack and Dolores Cakebread

> The Child Ballads are 305 traditional ballads from England and Scotland, and their American variants, anthologized by Francis James Child

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Ballads

And similarly, the Children's Python is a snake that's considered suitable as a pet, named after John George Children.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_python

Guillotine: Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin Rastafari: Haile Selassie (born Lij Tafari Makonnen)

One that is widely know but people never seem to think about is "America".

Named after the sort of person we would probably not name anything after nowadays, and, ironically, doing so would be most outrageous in the places named after him.

Vespucci also coined the term "New World", so one word for this place is the guy's name and the other was invented by the guy.

My favorite is, although mentioned on the list without the Hungarian accented characters, is the ELO system (chess).

Named after Árpád Élő, "Elo" is not an abbreviation but his last name, and means "living" in Hungarian.

It's not actually the "ELO" system. People just think it's an acronym mistakenly and capitalize it. It's supposed to be written as just "Elo."

Exactly my point. I would also enforce the accents, haha.

Especially because when I was younger, I always thought it is "élő" (living, persisting, current), as in: it's the current up-to-date valuation of someone's rank

A mentor is named after Mentor, who watched over Telemachus, Odysseus's son.

Just about every person/god in Greek mythology has something named after them though: Arachnids, Atlas, Nike, Hermes, Apollo, Uranus

French drains!

Oh crap that’s a really good example

Elbakyan has several biological species named in her honor:

- Idiogramma elbakyanae, a species of parasitoid wasps discovered by Russian and Mexican entomologists in 2017.

- Brachyplatystoma elbakyani [es], an extinct species of catfish discovered by Argentine paleontologists in 2020.

- Amphisbaena elbakyanae, a species of worm lizard discovered in 2021.[58]

- Sibogasyrinx elbakyanae [c; d], a species of deep-sea snail discovered by researchers from Russia and France in 2021

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Elbakyan#Recogniti...

Those are obviously named after a person, not unexpectedly.

There is a park near me named Alice Keck Park. It is named after Alice Keck Park.

> The diesel engine, named after Rudolf Diesel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_engine

I don't think this is one of those kinds of things, is it?

That seems pretty expected. If you’d asked me to guess where the word diesel came from, I probably would have guessed a name. Compare that to German chocolate cake, which seems preposterous.

German's Chocolate Cake is probably a better name for it. I knew something as up with that one the first time I met a german person and they had never heard of my favorite cake. Baker's chocolate was a surprise to me though, I've always made my German's Chocolate Cake with Baker's chocolate...

Vin Diesel, named after the engine, was originally Mark Sinclair. Which is actually not a bad name.

An interesting Czech entry would be "karma".

It sounds like the ancient Indian word for fate/consequences, but it is a synonym for normal household gas heater, and the etymology is KarMa = Karel Macháček, name of the engineer whose corporation produced them in former Czechoslovakia. This guy (Czech only):

https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karel_Mach%C3%A1%C4%8Dek_(kons...

Incidentally, Y Combinator is also named in honour of Charles Y, the little-known second cousin (once removed) of famous ML researcher Andrew Ng. May we never forget him.

We might find some more good ones in

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_eponyms_(A%E2%80%93K)#...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_eponyms_(L%E2%80%93Z)#...

Borders Books (for anyone who remembers it) was named after founders Tom and Louis Borders. Louis went on to found Webvan (for anyone who remembers that).

Yes, things are often named after people. That alone does not make it unexpected and notable here.

-self-appointed policeman of this thing

The thing that made it unexpected in my case is that “borders” is an English word and was not previously known to me as a name. I was surprised and amused when I learned it was an eponym. That puts it in the same category as the other examples on this site, at least from my perspective.

Am I being detained, Mr. Policeman?

"this thing" is things unexpectedly named after people. "Borders" is an English word not in very popular use as a name; "Borders Books and Music" sounds more like it's of a piece with something like "Encore Books" than, as it turns out actually to be, with "Barnes & Noble Booksellers". So it's unexpectedly named after people.

This one had never occurred to me, being from Ann Arbor, I went to school with one of their daughters. Everyone in town knew that it was a surname.

But now that you mention it, this fact is not at all obvious from the name.

Snow Canyon was named after Lorenzo and Erastus Snow. Incidentally, Erastus Snow is also one of the namesakes of Snowflake Arizona, which is on this list.

Jeff Flake is from Snowflake, and his great-great-grandfather was the other founder of the town.

One of my favorites. The nearby Virgin River was also possibly named after a Thomas Virgin rather than any wild or unmodified qualities of the river.

The crapper

The canonical example of this phenomenon, IMHO

After you read the site, the title becomes wrong.

I think you use the word "unexpected" differently than I do.

The word "crass" comes from "Marcus Licinius Crassus", a roman general and politician[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Licinius_Crassus

The Loyal Heights neighborhood in Seattle is named after the developer's daughter, Loyal Graef Treat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyal_Heights,_Seattle

From Warhammer 40K (I am sure it was done retroactively for the joke).

Land Raiders and Land Speeders are named after Arkhan Land :)

https://youtu.be/LhspXkE8wVQ?feature=shared

Currying (of functions) named after Haskell Curry[1], after whom Haskell is also named.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_Curry

https://mathworld.wolfram.com/HeavisideStepFunction.html

[edit, clearing since I guess this is too far afield, sorry, though it was interesting.]

The main point is the list are things named after people who's etymology is utterly unexpected and surprising. It's like if the Rocky mountains were named after William Rocky.

The "Sharpe Ratio" was named after William F. Sharpe, who developed it in 1966.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpe_ratio

He also invented the Sharpie marker, after other traders kept erasing his fibonacci plots on the whiteboard

Panettone, "Tony's bread." Or at least that's what my Italian acct. prof. insisted. Interestingly the Italian wiki entry is a lot longer than the English one and references this apparent urban legend.

> From Milanese Lombard panaton, an augmentative of pan (“bread”).

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/panettone