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I'm also cringing a little bit to learn that the practice of misspelling words with a "K" is as old as the "Dumpster Kolector" from the 1940s.

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It looks like the trend started circa the 1920s in the U.S. Kotex (1920) [0], Kleenex (1924) [1], Kool-Aid (1927) [2], Kool (1933) [3], Krispy Kreme (1934) [4].

Kraft might look like one, but isn't, it's named after James Kraft [5], which presumably traces back to the german word Kraft.

I'm curious if there are older examples.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kotex [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleenex [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kool-Aid [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kool_(cigarette) [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krispy_Kreme [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_L._Kraft

Not a brand name, but "ok" is widely believed to be from a meme from 1838 where abbreviations were comically misspelled. "Ok" being "Oll Korrect":

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

Isn't the deliberate misspelling of words in trade names used to create names eligible for trademark protection?

I find them horrible cringeworthy, too. Names with letters pronounced phonetically (e.g. "EZ"), sound-alike vowels (e.g. "Lyft"), and substituted consonants (like the K for C) irritate me a lot. (I'm an angry pedant and I know it...)

There, there, it's All Correct. It'll be AC.

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