Skip to footer

Apple, Hulu, Etsy: How famous tech companies got their names

Here's a look at some of the most prolific tech companies today and how they ended up with their names.

8. Twitter

Kacper Pempel/Reuters/File
The shadows of people holding mobile phones are cast onto a backdrop projected with the Twitter logo in this illustration picture.

Sure you may jump when you get an unexpected Twitter notification on your phone, but did you know that reaction almost inspired the social media site’s name?

"We wanted a name that evoked what we did," Twitter founder Jack Dorsey told WNYC in 2011. When you received a tweet, he said, "your phone would buzz. It would jitter. It would twitch."

But jitter and twitch have negative connotations, so Mr. Dorsey and another member of the early Twitter team, Noah Glass, did what many tech companies do when stumped: they headed to the dictionary. They started at the word twitch, and only got through a few definitions before coming upon “twitter,” which means a short, inconsequential burst of information (also: chirps from birds).

“We were like, that describes exactly what we're doing here,” he adds. “So it was an easy choice, and we got twitter.com for some very low price, and we named the company Twitter."

Well, the company actually first called the service “Twttr.” In the end, even short bursts of information are better served with vowels.

8 of 17
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.