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Apple, Hulu, Etsy: How famous tech companies got their names

Here's a look at some of the most prolific tech companies today and how they ended up with their names.

2. Amazon

Mark Lennihan/AP/File
The Amazon logo.

Originally, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos wanted to call his online bookstore “Cadabra,” according to biographer Ann Byers. When he pitched the name to his lawyer, however, his lawyer hesitated -- he thought Mr. Bezos had said “cadaver.” Obviously, Bezos didn’t want this to be a persistent mistake, so he decided to incorporate the company as Cadabra and then choose a new name later.

From there, he decided the company name would start with the letter “A,” to reference bookstore organization, so he pulled out the dictionary and started scanning his options. “Amazon,” in reference to the Amazon River in South America, quickly stood out as the best option as it was exotic, different, and by far the largest river in the world. He wanted the online store to be "different" and "bigger" than the competition. So, Cadaver — I mean, Cadabra — was replaced with Amazon.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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