Guess the brand by emoji

Apple — Steve Jobs picked the name after a stint on a fruitarian diet that included a visit to an apple orchard — he thought it sounded fun and unintimidating next to a computing scene full of companies called things like 'Data Systems.' It also landed ahead of his old employer, Atari, in an alphabetical phone listing.

Google — A Stanford classmate suggested 'googol' — the term for a 1 followed by a hundred zeros — as a nod to the founders' goal of organizing an unimaginable amount of information. Whoever typed the domain registration misspelled it, and the typo became permanent.

Amazon — Jeff Bezos originally incorporated the company as Cadabra, short for abracadabra, until his own lawyer kept mishearing it as 'cadaver' over the phone. He went back to the dictionary and landed on Amazon, the world's largest river, partly because sites were listed alphabetically back then and he wanted an A.

McDonald's — It's simply the surname of brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald, who ran the original drive-in restaurant in San Bernardino, California, years before Ray Kroc ever bought the chain from them.

Coca-Cola — Bookkeeper Frank Mason Robinson coined the name from the drink's two original ingredients — coca leaves and kola nuts — then deliberately swapped the K for a C so the two words would match in his flowing handwritten logo.

Nike — Nike's first employee, Jeff Johnson, proposed the name after it came to him in a dream, borrowing the Greek goddess of victory. Phil Knight still preferred his own pick, 'Dimension Six,' right up until the deadline forced a decision.

Adidas — Just Adi Dassler's own nickname plus the first syllables of his surname — Adi plus Das. The three-stripe mark came later, bought outright from a small Finnish sportswear maker for the equivalent of about 1,600 euros and two bottles of whisky.

Starbucks — The founders wanted something nautical and coffee-flavored, and settled on Starbuck, the coffee-loving first mate from Moby-Dick, after briefly considering naming the whole company Pequod, after the ship.

Netflix — A straightforward mashup of 'internet' and 'flicks,' picked in 1997 back when the business was mail-order DVD rentals, not streaming.

IKEA — An acronym of founder Ingvar Kamprad's own initials plus the farm and village where he grew up — Elmtaryd and Agunnaryd. He was seventeen when he registered it.

BMW — Bayerische Motoren Werke is exactly what it sounds like — Bavarian Motor Works — describing where the company was based long before it built a single car; its first products were aircraft engines.

Pepsi — Pharmacist Caleb Bradham marketed his drink as a digestive aid and named it after pepsin, the stomach enzyme, borrowing from the medical term 'dyspepsia' the drink supposedly relieved.

Subway — It began as Pete's Super Submarines in 1965, opened by 17-year-old Fred DeLuca on a loan from family friend Peter Buck. A radio ad recorded in a heavy accent got misheard as something else entirely, and the simpler 'Subway' stuck a few years later.

Burger King — About as literal as brand names get — a burger restaurant with 'king' bolted on for a bit of majesty. It first traded under the near-identical name Insta-Burger King, until new owners simplified the sign a few years later.

Twitter — Co-founder Noah Glass went hunting through the Oxford English Dictionary for a word close to his rejected first choice, Twitch, and landed on 'twitter': a short burst of inconsequential information, like a bird's chirp.

Uber — Straight from the German word 'über,' meaning above or superior — a nod to a premium car service positioned a notch over an ordinary taxi.

Airbnb — Short for Air Bed and Breakfast, from the founders' actual first booking: three air mattresses laid out on their apartment floor for out-of-town visitors during a sold-out San Francisco design conference.

Puma — Rudolf Dassler, brother of Adidas founder Adi, first registered his own shoe company as 'Ruda,' a mash-up of his own name. He renamed it Puma within the same year, after the big cat.

Volkswagen — German for 'the people's car,' describing exactly what the 1930s project was built to be: an automobile ordinary German families could actually afford.

Lego — Ole Kirk Christiansen named his small carpentry workshop after the Danish phrase 'leg godt' — 'play well' — years before it ever touched a plastic brick.

Sony — Co-founder Akio Morita blended the Latin 'sonus,' meaning sound, with the American slang 'sonny boys' — his shorthand for the sharp young engineers he wanted the brand to represent.

Nokia — The company started as a wood-pulp mill on the banks of Finland's Nokianvirta river, and simply kept the town's name — itself an old word for a local marten-like animal — as it grew into electronics.

YouTube — 'Tube' was 1950s American slang for a television set, so the founders built a name meaning, roughly, your own personal channel.

Spotify — Daniel Ek has admitted the real story is a mishearing — he misheard a word Martin Lorentzon shouted across a room, searched it, found the domain free, and kept it. The tidier explanation involving 'spot' and 'identify' came later, once the accident felt too embarrassing to admit.

Nestlé — Henri Nestlé's own surname means 'little nest' in the Swiss German dialect he grew up speaking, which is why the logo has stayed a bird feeding chicks in a nest for over 150 years.

Nutella — Ferrero built the word from the English 'nut' plus the Italian affectionate ending '-ella,' chosen to echo the sound of an already-beloved Italian product name: mozzarella.

Audi — August Horch lost the rights to his own surname in a lawsuit brought by his former business partners, so his new company translated the name into Latin instead — 'horch' means 'listen' in German, and 'audi' means the same in Latin.

Zara — Amancio Ortega wanted to call his shop Zorba, after the film Zorba the Greek, until he discovered a local bar already used the name. He'd already bought the letter molds for a sign, so he just rearranged them into Zara.

H&M — It began as a women's-only shop called Hennes, Swedish for 'hers.' Buying a hunting-and-fishing retailer called Mauritz Widforss years later brought menswear into the range, and both names onto the sign.

Gucci — No hidden meaning here — it's founder Guccio Gucci's own surname, plain and simple.

Reebok — A young Joe Foster found the word in a dictionary he'd won as a childhood race prize: an Afrikaans spelling of 'rhebok,' a South African antelope.

Costco — Never officially confirmed by the company, but almost universally read as a squeeze of 'cost' and 'company' — fitting for a warehouse chain built entirely around bulk discounts.

Walmart — Sam Walton's own surname, shortened and welded to 'mart.' Not much of a mystery, but his very first store still traded simply as Walton's.

Aldi — Short for Albrecht Diskont — literally 'Albrecht discount' — named for brothers Karl and Theo Albrecht, who later split the company in two, Aldi Nord and Aldi Süd, after a falling-out over whether to stock cigarettes.

Visa — Founder Dee Hock deliberately picked a word already recognized worldwide, in nearly every language, carrying no ties to any single country — a clean break from the old name, National BankAmericard.

HSBC — The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, named for the two cities its founders opened branches in back in 1865 — no hidden meaning, just geography.

Vodafone — A straightforward blend of voice, data and phone — with 'phone' respelled 'fone' by the ad agency, over the CEO's initial objections, before he decided the name was actually rather good.

Verizon — A blend of the Latin 'veritas,' meaning truth, and the English 'horizon,' chosen when Bell Atlantic and GTE merged in 2000 and wanted a name that sounded forward-looking rather than like a phone company.

Haribo — Hans Riegel simply combined the first two letters of his own name with the first two of his hometown, Bonn, into one tidy word.

Mazda — Jujiro Matsuda named the company for Ahura Mazda, the Zoroastrian god of wisdom and light, partly because the Japanese pronunciation happens to echo his own surname.

Adobe — Named for Adobe Creek, the stream that ran behind co-founder John Warnock's house in Los Altos — where he and Charles Geschke first sketched out the company in the garage.

Nvidia — The founders had no name yet and just called their project files 'NV,' short for 'next version.' Hunting for a real word containing those letters, they landed on the Latin 'invidia' — envy — and leaned into it hard enough that the logo is famously green.

Canon — The company's first camera prototype in 1933 was called Kwanon, after a Buddhist deity linked with mercy. Two years later, chasing a name that would travel better internationally, they registered 'Canon' instead.

Fanta — Coca-Cola's German operation lost access to its usual syrup during a wartime trade embargo, so the local director told his team to use their 'Fantasie' — imagination — to invent a replacement. A salesman shouted back the obvious shortened version.

Mountain Dew — 'Mountain dew' was already century-old Appalachian slang for moonshine by the time two Tennessee bottlers borrowed it in the 1940s for a lemon-lime soda built specifically to mix with bourbon.

Häagen-Dazs — Founder Reuben Mattus made the entire name up — it isn't a real word in Danish or anywhere else, and Danish doesn't even use the umlaut over the ä. He just wanted something that sounded European and expensive.

Uniqlo — It was meant to be a tidy contraction of 'Unique Clothing Warehouse' — Uniclo — until a Hong Kong trademark clerk misread the C as a Q in 1988. The founder liked the accident enough to keep it.

Lufthansa — A blend of 'Luft,' German for air, and 'Hansa,' a nod to the medieval Hanseatic trading league — positioning the young airline as heir to centuries of German commerce, just airborne.

Ryanair — About as direct as it gets: founder Tony Ryan's own surname, tacked onto the industry it operates in.

Qantas — An acronym nobody bothers spelling out anymore — Queensland And Northern Territory Aerial Services — describing exactly the remote outback routes the airline was built to fly in 1920.

Vaseline — Coined by inventor Robert Chesebrough from the German 'wasser,' water, and the Greek 'elaion,' oil — a nod to his own theory, since disproven, that petroleum jelly formed underground from decomposing water.

WD-40 — It stands for Water Displacement, 40th formula — the name lifted straight from a chemist's lab notebook after 39 earlier attempts at a rust-proofing spray hadn't worked.

Duracell — A blunt combination of 'durable' and 'cell,' introduced in 1965 to describe batteries that outlasted the old carbon-zinc kind — a claim solid enough to eventually put the brand on the Apollo 11 mission.

Kleenex — Kimberly-Clark took 'clean,' respelled it with a K, and added the '-ex' ending already used on its earlier product Kotex, to signal the new tissue belonged to the same family.

Nivea — From the Latin 'nivea,' meaning snow-white — a direct description of the cream's original color, chosen by the chemist who invented it in 1911.

Colgate — William Colgate's own surname — he opened a candle-and-soap shop in New York in 1806, and toothpaste didn't arrive under the brand for another century.

Gillette — King Camp Gillette spent years failing to engineer a disposable blade before an MIT-trained engineer named William Nickerson finally solved the manufacturing problem — the whole razor line still carries the inventor-turned-salesman's own name.

L'Oréal — Chemist Eugène Schueller's first hair dye was named L'Auréale, after a fashionable 1900s hairstyle called the auréole — French for a golden halo. The name got trimmed to L'Oréal not long after.

Mattel — Two founders' names got mashed together — Harold 'Matt' Matson and Elliot Handler — with no room left over for the company's third founder, Ruth Handler, whose name later went on Barbie's box instead.

Jägermeister — Curt Mast, an enthusiastic hunter, borrowed the honorary German title for senior gamekeepers and forest rangers wholesale for his new liqueur in 1934: 'Jäger' plus 'Meister' — hunt master.