Google谷歌
Dreamed up in a Stanford University computer science building, Google was originally called BackRub, for the way it mined links in every nook and cranny of the Web. In 1997, when the founders of the company were searching for a new name for their rapidly improving search technology, they wanted a moniker that suggested a huge amount of data. A friend suggested the word googolplex, which prompted Larry Page to counter with googol. Both are words for incredibly large numbers—a googol is ten to the hundredth power, and a googolplex is a number ten times as large as a googol. When a friend tried to register the new domain name, he misspelled “googol” as “google,” and the misspelling stuck.

Coca-Cola可口可乐
In 1886, a Georgian named John Pemberton developed a carbonated beverage that he sold as a health tonic and intended to cure everything from migraines to impotence. The product’s name reflected its two main ingredients: cocaine, derived from the coca plant, and caffeine, from the kola nut. Originally, the beverage did contain hefty doses of cocaine, but subsequent versions phased out the drug and by 1903, it had been removed completely, though Coca-Cola still uses derivatives of the coca plant for flavoring. If you think that’s shocking, consider this: Pemberton’s very first iteration of his beverage not only contained cocaine, but also was alcoholic, called Pemberton’s French Wine Coca.

Yahoo!雅虎
In 1796, Jonathan Swift wrote in Gulliver’s Travels of a fantastical race of beings called the Yahoos, who were vile, slovenly, and stupid. In 1994, as Stanford PhD candidates Jerry Yang and David Filo looked for a better name for their information-indexing Web site, which they were calling “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web,” a quick search through a dictionary reminded them about Swift’s Yahoos, and they loved the idea. Officially, their search engine’s name is an acronym of “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle,” but Yang and Filo professed that they liked the name Yahoo! because they saw themselves the way Swift saw his own Yahoos: as rude, unsophisticated, and uncouth.

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