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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.

5. Hulu

Businesswire/File
Hulu Plus on Roku.

Sometimes whimsical, catchy names have purposefully little meaning (see: Etsy) and sometimes they have actual meaning. Hulu is a case of the latter.

Hulu CEO Jason Kilar explains how they decided on the name in a blog post from 2008.

“In Mandarin, Hulu has two interesting meanings, each highly relevant to our mission,” he writes. “The primary meaning interested us because it is used in an ancient Chinese proverb that describes the Hulu as the holder of precious things. It literally translates to ‘gourd,’ and in ancient times, the Hulu was hollowed out and used to hold precious things. The secondary meaning is ‘interactive recording.’”

Regardless of whether you think episodes of "Modern Family" and "The Colbert Report" are precious, a website that houses online videos certainly falls in line with both of these definitions. Also, Hulu is a really fun word to say.

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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”:

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