Isis was an Egyptian goddess before her name got coopted by a terrorist group.

My brother adopted a dog a few years back named Isis (after the Egyptian god). Even though Isis now had a very different connotation, they felt bad to change the dog's name. They recently adopted another dog which I jokingly recommended they name Al Qaeda.

I didn't know the name "Isis" had actually seen its popularity affected that much in the US? It still feels like a beautiful classical name to me, but then we never used the English name "ISIS" for the organisation, here in France.

It's a shame that the multimillenial name of an ancient god could be ruined for some people by an organization that lasted less than a decade, I hope this effect doesn't last.

"Al Qaeda" can be translated as "The Foundation", and there is apparently some discussion about Bin Laden being an Asimov fan and basing the name of his organisation on the Foundation Series. Also, I am reliably informed that wiping your Al Qaeda has apparently become slang in some places.

My friend has a 10 year old daughter named Isis.

It's not like the terrorist group choose that name. They choose to call themselves Daesh. ISIS was a term coined by Western miliary and/or media.

The actual name is ad-Dawlah al-Islāmiyah, "Islamic State". The Arabic acronym Daesh ("D.S.") is considered derogatory by IS itself.

Anyone remember the NFC mobile payments platform from 2011 that was called Isis Wallet?

It was a pretty big deal (huge backing by carriers, phone manufacturers, and credit card companies). They changed the name to Softcard.

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

I believe it came out when Al Qaeda was the boogey man. ISIS didn't get any press until 2013:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=i...

The Pentagon didn't start calling it the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) until 2017. Prior to then, it was the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

Worth noting that the Islamic State has preferred being called ISIS. I think calling them ISIL was being done in part to annoy them.

No, it's more to do with the ambiguity of the Arabic original ad-Dawlah al-Islāmiyah fī 'l-ʿIrāq wa-sh-Shām. The "Sham" bit here can be refer either to the present day state of Syria, hence ISIS; or the historical greater Syria aka Levant, hence ISIL. However, the group internally dropped the qualified some time ago, now it's just Islamic State, with the obvious implication that it's the global state for true believers.

Wikipedia goes into all this in detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_Islamic_State_of_...

There was a tweet about the poor NSA intern who would be tasked with the code to identify whether "is" referred to the organization or the verb. The paranoid side of me always assumed that the rebranding to Isis could have been suggested by the Pentagon to news organizations for that reason.

Parts of the Thames that flow through Oxford are called “The Isis” (presumably after the Goddess), and there are (or at least were) a good number of Oxford things called that

Was Isis a well known terrorist organisation in 2009 ?

They weren't even calling themselves ISIS back in 2009, so no.

No.

Isis and ISIS are two completely different and unrelated things.

Yes, there are a lot of people named Isis. It used to be possible to get a Coke that said 'Share a Coke with Isis' on it, but i think they stopped making them.