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.

> 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

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.

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.

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

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”).

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

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

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"...

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