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Comment by korijn | Hacker News Reader

For one moment there I thought Amazon had done a good thing!

Pet peeve: companies that appropriate a dictionary term for their name, e.g. Apple, Google (& Alphabet), Amazon, Oracle. It's really not too hard to create a new name for your company, e.g. Microsoft, Facebook and Nvidia.

Facebook isn't a new name either. Some schools would publish and distribute a book of student photos with names at the beginning of the school year, to help recognize peers; these were called a facebook. Yearbooks are similar, but published at the end of the year and also have a lot of content about what happened that year and organizations and sports.

didn't know that... In that case I should count "Facebook" as another violater.

A face book is a generic term for a school directory with photographs. That's why Zuckerberg called it The Facebook to differentiate it from all the other face books.

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

Microsoft doesn’t belong in this list after they trademarked Windows, Word, Works (remember, Microsoft Works is an oxymoron) and others.

Microsoft Works was such a weird product because it was just half-assed Microsoft Office, but Microsoft Office already existed.

No. Works predated Office by 3 years at least. The first versions of Works ran under ms-dos.

Several other vendors had office "works" suites too. ClarisWorks, AppleWorks, seems like there were some others for the variety of platforms in the 80s/90s but I can't recall them offhand.

Lotus symphony.

As I understand, Microsoft Works was primary aimed at retail buyers, but Microsoft Office was aimed at enterprises users. MW was probably half the cost of MO. It is market segmentation, as I see it.

I don’t think Google should be on that list. The word is “googol.”

Not to mention, even “googol” is a word almost no one uses (unlike “apple” and “Amazon”).

If you count Google as an appropriation of Googol, surely Nvidia appropriates Invidia?

Those are different though? At no point in that sentence was I confused about which word meant what. Unlike Amazonian datacenters deep in the Amazon's Amazon.

Nah. "Google" is pronounced the same as the English word "Googol", so I do consider it appropriating. Meanwhile, Invidia is a latin word, which as a dead language, and it is pronounced differently from "Nvidia", so I don't consider that the same as appropriating a living language word.

"invidia" is an Italian word, so it does survive in living languages.

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

"Nvidia" as "officially" pronounced in English is not significantly different from some of those pronunciations.

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

And the founders seemed to be well aware of the existing usage when they chose the name.

> Pet peeve: companies that appropriate a dictionary term for their name, e.g. Apple, Google (& Alphabet), Amazon, Oracle.

Hard disagree. Consider "Oracle," a truly inspired name for a database company. It's an admirable choice. Here's the computer science definition.

> In complexity theory and computability theory, an oracle machine is an abstract machine that can query a black box called an oracle, which is able to give an answer to any instance of a certain problem in a single operation.

There's also the wealth of linkages with classical oracles, e.g., Delphi, Cumae (technically a Sibyl), Dodona, etc. [1] Taken together, it's hard to think of a better name.

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

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

Related - companies named after animals or use animal names as part of their name /logo /mascot should at least contribute a share of their profits to its conservation

nVidia comes from the Latin word invidia, which means things like envy, or jealousy.

Microsoft (originally Micro-Soft) is a portmanteau of microcomputer and software.

Facebook, as others have mentioned, is a compound word that was borrowed from what literal books of faces [and names] were called.

When I think of non-dictionary names, I think of things like Mosptnspg.

portmanteaus are great, actually.

Didn't know that about facebook.

Non-dictionary names don't need to be as wierd as Mosptnspg. Could simply be Frodel.

Wildberries

same - I was like "headline reads like PR but I guess it's good..." reminder to self: there was an Amazon before the bald bookseller

He also wasn't bald when he started selling books.

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-25-the-m...

I thought for a moment this was some kind of reference to "no more destroyed Amazon Ground trailers on underpasses"...

Selling you dirt-cheap goods with next-day delivery isn't enough for you?

I had the exact same reaction for a moment. But no, of course not.

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