Ask for It by Name!

If Pierre Omidyar had been a little quicker on his feet, the name “eBay” would be nothing but an annoying typo today.

In 1995, Omidyar, a French-Iranian immigrant and Silicon Valley veteran, created a web site he called Auction Web, an electronic flea market where visitors could hawk Beanie Babies, computer gear and the Pez dispensers his then-girlfriend (now wife) collected. Unfortunately, the internet gold rush was by then in full swing, and the domain name “auctionweb.com” was already taken, as was “echobay.com” (after Omidyar’s Echo Bay Technology Group). But “ebay.com” was ripe for the picking, and Omidyar snapped it up. And from that third-choice domain name the internet’s premier auction site grew. Today on a typical day there are more than 16 million items up for auction on eBay in more than 16,000 categories, and in 2002 eBay members unloaded more than $14 billion dollars worth of goods on the site. Presumably, Mrs. Omidyar now rarely gets outbid on Pez dispensers.

Since domain names on the internet do not distinguish between upper and lower case letters, the distinctive capitalization “eBay” was not, strictly speaking, necessary. But the alternative “ebay” would most likely have usually been pronounced “eh-bay” or “eb-ay,” more evocative of a startled diner (”Eb-AY! That’s hot!”) than a multi-billion dollar business empire. The lower-case “e” prefix also evokes the great 90s “e-commerce” boom, a boom of whose fizzle eBay is probably most the wildly successful survivor. As a verb, “to eBay” might well mean “to make pots of money from the very first day.”

According to the LEGO web site, “On average every person on planet Earth has 52 LEGO bricks.” Aside from being a good illustration of the statistical slipperiness of the word “average” (many of us own no LEGO bricks whatsoever that we know of), that statement (along with “327 billion LEGO elements have been molded since 1949″) indicates that LEGO is one very hot toy company.

Although LEGO bricks are one of the world’s most successful uses of plastics, the company’s roots lie back in 1932 in the little town of Billund, Denmark, where plastics were probably very rare if not entirely unknown. In that year Ole Kirk Christiansen, a master carpenter, established a business manufacturing stepladders, ironing boards, stools and, presumably as a sideline, wooden toys. By 1934, however, toys had become a big enough part of the business that Ole renamed his business LEGO, from the Danish words “”Leg Godt,” meaning “play well.” A bit further on, he discovered that “lego” is, serendipitously, also Latin for “I put together.”

LEGO prospered and expanded over the following years, concentrating primarily on wooden toys such as the classic LEGO duck, and by 1949 had begun producing plastic “Automatic Binding Bricks,” the forerunner of today’s LEGO bricks. Oddly enough, at the 1955 international debut of LEGO bricks at a toy fair in Nuremberg, Germany, the reaction from those present was not positive. Undeterred, LEGO soldiered on, spewing out bricks and a wide variety of other toys on its march to each of us owning those average 52 bricks.

So ubiquitous have LEGO sets become that if one could wrest just the ones sold in the past ten years from the hands of their little owners and place them end to end, the assembly would stretch from London to Perth. To any parent whose living room has been transformed into a LEGO minefield, this vision brings to mind a more literal translation of that Latin “lego,” namely “to pick up, to gather together scattered objects.”