List of Company Name Etymologies - Y

Y

• Yahoo! – The word Yahoo was invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his book Gulliver's Travels. It represents a person who is repulsive in appearance and barely human. Yahoo! founders David Filo and Jerry Yang jokingly considered themselves yahoos. It's also an interjection sometimes associated with United States Southerners' and Westerners' expression of joy, as alluded to in Yahoo.com commercials that end with someone singing the word "yahoo". It is also sometime jokingly referred to by its backronym, Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.
• YKK – zipper manufacturer named from Yoshida Kogyo Kabushikikaisha (Yoshida Company Limited) after the founder, Tadao Yoshida. The letters YKK were stamped onto the zippers' pull tabs.
• Yakult – Official claims state that the name is derived from jahurto, an older form of jogurto, the Esperanto word for "yogurt". However, it has also been claimed that the name is derived from the fact that the product was developed from ancient Mongolian practices of culturing yak's milk in a sack made from a yak's stomach – the combination of Yak and Culture in English giving the product name as "Yakult".
• Yamaha – after Torakusu Yamaha, who founded the company as Nippon Gakki Seizō Kabushiki Gaisha (Japan Musical Instrument Manufacturing Corporation) in 1897 after repairing a reed organ. The official name was changed to Yamaha Corporation on 1 October 1987.
• Yoplait – from the merger of Yola and Coplait in 1965.