Yet Another Name Change
Now that Yahoo has become a $44 billion soccer ball in takeover battles, it is interesting to look back on the origin of this name. Only 14 years old – an eternity in internet time – this is one of the last names that came straight out of the dictionary and the domain was free!
Jerry Yang and his partners were looking through a dictionary for any words similar to Yacc (Yet Another C Compiler for those of you who are not Unix propeller heads) when they came across the word Yahoo. I am sure they must have looked at the meaning too – and promptly ignored it – because definitions vary from “A slightly crazy cowboy” to “a brutish, vicious person”. Today this is almost a conservative name. Amazing how things change with time and usage. But I bet they never would have picked such a radical name (at the time) if they had not been a bunch of youngsters fresh off campus. Can you imagine an older management team telling their board of directors about the meaning of such a name? Not many places it would have flown, other than at what today is Yum! brands.
Of course, despite what the dictionaries say, Yahoo had become the sound of an expressive yell as well… and why the company name is properly tagged with an exclamation mark!
P.S. My big old Webster’s points out that the first meaning of the word came from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels: a race of brutes having the form and all the degrading passions of man. If the takeover fight gets dirty, this might become too true!
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