Re:How does IKEA come up with names for its products?
by RugnirViking on Tuesday August 18, 2026 @02:57PM
(#49350826)
its not all that strange tbh - im learning danish which is adjacent enough to swedish that I can understand most of the names - sometimes they aren't relevant to the product function, sometimes they are, but they're just names. Is it strange to you that the word "photoshop" uses english language? what about a Hamburger being named after a place?
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Re:How does IKEA come up with names for its products?
by fyltr on Tuesday August 18, 2026 @03:24PM
(#49351225)
Nitpicking but your examples all have a clear etymology that may even help you deduce the purpose of a thing.
Hamburger means 'from Hamburg' and can be short for 'in the style of Hamburg', which sounds perfectly normal to a native. This is, would I say, less strange than if it was named 'Hamburg', which seems to be the case of IKEA furniture.
Photoshop, in the same way, seems to refer to a photo workshop, which once again has an etymology, as it refers to the initial purpose of that program, reworking pictures.
On the opposite, if things are just named 'for the lulz', and my desk is called Boston, my text editor 'golden retriever' and my lamp acorn, confusion may at some point arise.
Re:How does IKEA come up with names for its products?
by schoen on Tuesday August 18, 2026 @03:33PM
(#49351375)
GNOME used to give software applications names of common nouns that were usually not strongly related to their function: Nautilus, Palimpsest, Totem, Tomboy, Seahorse. At some point I think they decided to move away from this because they found many users had a hard time remembering the names.
Re:How does IKEA come up with names for its products?
by dylan604 on Tuesday August 18, 2026 @09:10PM
(#49355273)
Is that rule number one or two in that naming things are hard?
Re:How does IKEA come up with names for its products?
by necovek on Wednesday August 19, 2026 @05:48AM
(#49359238)
The way I remember it, GNOME moved away from funny release codenames all the way back around 2004 or 2005, and then gradually moved to application names reflecting their generic function (eg. gedit was for a long time called "Gnome Text Editor" in the .desktop file, basically hiding the component name in an about dialog, before another "gnome text editor" was introduced to replace it, but I haven't tracked this and maybe it's just a project rename too).
I do believe it is acceptable for software to have playful names. After all, that's how "googling", "tweeting" have entered the vocabulary (and no, nobody is "facebooking"). I am pretty sure global human population is not so dumb to not be able to learn to associate a non-function-reflecting name to its purpose. If anything, it's a marketing thing.
Re:How does IKEA come up with names for its products?
by dmurray on Tuesday August 18, 2026 @03:49PM
(#49351625)
How about eating a Sandwich with Turkey, Bologna and Cheddar, maybe with a Paris-Brest for dessert?
Re:How does IKEA come up with names for its products?
by wodenokoto on Wednesday August 19, 2026 @12:57AM
(#49357032)
Every furniture chain I’ve been in contact with have had furniture names like “Boston” and “acorn” and is “golden retriever” really that far off from Apple old OS naming scheme with snow leopards, lions and cougars?