IKEA NAMES.

August 31, 2003 by 8 Comments

Margaret Marks of Transblawg has an entry explaining a few of the basic rules of IKEA’s often bizarre-sounding product names; if you read German, you can go to her source, an article in Stern, and find out much more. Or you can just play the IKEA game.

Comments

  1. MM says
    August 31, 2003 at 6:02 pm

    I think I’ll add a list in English. I couldn’t find it at a cursory glance at the Web.

  2. zizka says
    August 31, 2003 at 6:09 pm

    Off topic, but I just found a great German word: “soundso”.

  3. beth says
    September 1, 2003 at 10:58 am

    A mystery solved.

  4. Jonathon Delacour says
    September 3, 2003 at 4:30 pm

    Thanks for the pointer, like many others I’ve been wondering about this for years.
    If, however, bookcase ranges are named after occupations, what does a BILLY do for a living?

  5. language hat says
    September 3, 2003 at 5:08 pm

    Well, according to my Cassell Dictionary of Slang, a billy is a policeman. So there you go.

  6. Jonathon Delacour says
    September 3, 2003 at 9:05 pm

    There you go, indeed. I knew of Bobby, but not Billy…

  7. Frank says
    November 19, 2003 at 1:03 pm

    Ahh….so *that’s* why the stick carried by police is called a “Billy Club”. I’ve always wondered about that.
    Frank.

  8. emma says
    February 9, 2006 at 2:59 pm

    but Billy’s not an occupation… not even here in Sweden

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