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For a Swede it must seem kind of strange to understand the product names. You see an ACORN toy, a NIGEL bookshelf, and the CROYDON sofa... which sounds like it
by fy20 1mo ago
For a Swede it must seem kind of strange to understand the product names. You see an ACORN toy, a NIGEL bookshelf, and the CROYDON sofa... which sounds like it belongs in a council estate flat.
Definately more fun would be the Polish version. How many people can pronounce the BYDGOSZCZ sofa, the PRZEMYSŁAW bookcase and the PSZCZOŁA soft toy?
- RugnirViking 1mo agoits not all that strange tbh - im learning danish which is adjacent enough to swedish that I can understand most of the names - sometimes they aren't relevant to the product function, sometimes they are, but they're just names. Is it strange to you that the word "photoshop" uses english language? what about a Hamburger being named after a place?
- fyltr 1mo agoNitpicking but your examples all have a clear etymology that may even help you deduce the purpose of a thing. Hamburger means 'from Hamburg' and can be short for 'in the style of Hamburg', which sounds perfectly normal to a native. This is, would I say, less strange than if it was named 'Hamburg', which seems to be the case of IKEA furniture. Photoshop, in the same way, seems to refer to a photo workshop, which once again has an etymology, as it refers to the initial purpose of that program, reworking pictures. On the opposite, if things are just named 'for the lulz', and my desk is called Boston, my text editor 'golden retriever' and my lamp acorn, confusion may at some point arise.
- schoen 1mo agoGNOME used to give software applications names of common nouns that were usually not strongly related to their function: Nautilus, Palimpsest, Totem, Tomboy, Seahorse. At some point I think they decided to move away from this because they found many users had a hard time remembering the names.
- dylan604 1mo agoIs that rule number one or two in that naming things are hard?
- necovek 1mo agoThe way I remember it, GNOME moved away from funny release codenames all the way back around 2004 or 2005, and then gradually moved to application names reflecting their generic function (eg. gedit was for a long time called "Gnome Text Editor" in the .desktop file, basically hiding the component name in an about dialog, before another "gnome text editor" was introduced to replace it, but I haven't tracked this and maybe it's just a project rename too). I do believe it is acceptable for software to have playful names. After all, that's how "googling", "tweeting" have entered the vocabulary (and no, nobody is "facebooking"). I am pretty sure global human population is not so dumb to not be able to learn to associate a non-function-reflecting name to its purpose. If anything, it's a marketing thing.
- dmurray 1mo agoHow about eating a Sandwich with Turkey, Bologna and Cheddar, maybe with a Paris-Brest for dessert?
- wodenokoto 1mo agoEvery furniture chain I’ve been in contact with have had furniture names like “Boston” and “acorn” and is “golden retriever” really that far off from Apple old OS naming scheme with snow leopards, lions and cougars?
- victorbjorklund 1mo agoIt is kind of funny sometimes. Sometimes it’s related to what the thing is (like a pun) and sometimes just random
- nine_k 1mo agoIf the goal is something that reads weird for most Europeans, then try picking names from Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, or Welsh.
- noir_lord 1mo agoMy missus is Hungarian, I'm sure it's a lovely language but it just sounds like Klingon to me. Which makes it hilarious when she's annoyed at the boy.
- pndy 1mo agoThe fact that Sz in Hungarian reads as s and other way around, S becomes sh - is mind-boggling especially for Poles, where Sz is pronounced as sh. and S remains s.
- nine_k 1mo agoIn Spanish "z" always sounds [s] (except in Spain where it sounds [θ]), but "s" can often sound [z].
- huhtenberg 1mo agoWait for the Italian where "cc" makes a "ch" sound and "ch" is "k" * When followed by e or i.
- pndy 1mo agoOh mio Dio :x
- decimalenough 1mo agoFunnily enough, there are quite a few IKEA products with Finnish names. (Most are place names from northern Sweden, where there's a significant Finnish minority.)
- teiferer 1mo ago
- ignoramous 1mo agoYou have a point but in Branding, it is accepted that bold (noisy) and distinctive (rather than only descriptive) names are an advantage: Creating billion-dollar brands: Vercel, Azure, Windsurf, Sonos, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adyIaTopO6g&t=610 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adyIaTopO6g&t=610 (Jun 2025).
- hahahaa 1mo agoEvery startup is named like these though so it is sorta biased. E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs
- noir_lord 1mo ago> CROYDON sofa I mean.. we have the Windsor Chair (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windsor_chair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windsor_chair) and the Welsh Dresser (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_dresser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_dresser) and those both slightly predate ikea so it's not a new thing.
- dmboyd 1mo agoOk porridge drawer is definitely someone having a laff
- dickiedyce 1mo agoNope. Real Scots history. See also ‘piece’
- Nursie 1mo agoDon't forget the Chesterfield!
- pndy 1mo agoIkea mobile application has little speaker near the product name that invokes pronunciation - sadly, that's not available on desktop site. I still tend to read Swedish accented letters in these names as German umlauts. So that wouldn't be a problem if Polish names would be provided with audio examples. By the way, the communistic period here was full of products using regular words, name of places or people’s names. We had Wisła, Bieszczady wall units. First Polish color TV was Jowisz (Jupiter); first TV ever my mother had was called Szafir (Saphire). Then Szarotka (elderweis) or Sylwia radios from 50s and 60s respectively. A clone of IBM PC with Intel 8086 (or with Russian clone) from 1986 was called Mazovia - Mazowsze which is a historical region of Poland, same name was also used for DOS encoding for that machine.
- kzrdude 1mo agoThe German vowels are a good start, but Swedish pronunciation is of course a little bit vowel shifted from German.
- hahahaa 1mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Electron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Electron
- MajorBee 1mo ago> BYDGOSZCZ sofa This may not even be that far off from reality, looking at the sort of names rando brands on Amazon often have...
- dylan604 1mo agoAt least BYDGOSZCZ is a real word in a real language
- mikestorrent 1mo agoPlace looks pretty nice, too.
- pseudohadamard 1mo agoNote to self: Change WiFi password, some bastard has posted it to HN for everyone to see.
- 1-more 1mo agoIt's not even that hard? Polish always takes a lot of crap for using z to modify the previous letter in exactly* the same way that h modifies the previous letter in English. * I'm sure it's not exactly the same, but people appreciate the effort of getting 90% of the way there by doing that.
- Inityx 1mo agoNo joke, I came across a cosmetics brand recently called "Pooplunch"
- simondotau 1mo agoGenius strategy for earning organic social media
- namelosw 1mo agoJust go to Polish IKEA and buy the Grzegorz table and Brzęczyszczykiewicz chairs …
- rubberpoliceman 1mo ago> Brzęczyszczykiewicz MAUL HALTEN!
- shmeeed 1mo agoFor everybody who's as lost as I was, the above is a quote from a 1970 polish movie: https://youtu.be/AfKZclMWS1U https://youtu.be/AfKZclMWS1U
- MomsAVoxell 1mo agoOida, was ist mit den Polen ..
- ehnto 1mo agoI have always thought this about western media. For all of us in non-us countries, the locations, roads and objects are all slightly foreign to us, giving it that other-world feel movies have. But for those in the US, wouldn't it all be a bit familiar? Whenever I watch a movie set in my home country with home accents and locations, it always feels a bit too familiar and it can cheapen the feel a bit.
- MichaelDickens 1mo agoWell, I'm an American, but US media is disproportionately set in Los Angeles or NYC, and I haven't been to either of those places. I was watching Monk recently, and it feels kinda neat seeing a show shot in San Francisco because I used to live there. I wouldn't say it feels "cheap" though.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- MarceliusK 1mo agoIKEA Poland missed an opportunity here
- mejutoco 1mo agoTak
- Agentlien 1mo agoAs a Swede, I always enjoy Ikea product names. Many of them are based on their actual function or category. Some are wordplay related to this. For example: Rinnig - a kitchen towel called "runny" Skaftet - a series of standing lamps and lamp stands called "the shaft" Fejka - plastic plants literally called "to fake" Knöckla - A garbage bin called "crumple up" Some I don't get but are still funny Ostbit - wooden serving tongs called "piece of cheese"?
- Sharlin 1mo agoI guess you can use the tongs to serve pieces of cheese.
- necovek 1mo agoI'd love seeing some Polish names in products and learning their pronounciation: but as a fellow Slavic language speaker (which there are hundreds of millions of, compared to 10 or 20 million Swedish speakers), I imagine I can do a pretty good job. So I think Swedish is still globally more playful. (I'd read it as БИЂОШЧ/БИДГОШЧ, ПРЗЕМИСЛАВ and ПШЧОЛА/ПШЧОЉА — you can check on Google Translate if I am close :))
- johanvts 1mo agoWould also be more fitting as most of it is made in Poland.
- thih9 1mo agoXaoc Devices are the heroes we need, they are yet to release BYDGOSZCZ but KOSZALIN is available to buy: - https://xaocdevices.com/main/ https://xaocdevices.com/main/ - https://xaocdevices.com/main/koszalin/ https://xaocdevices.com/main/koszalin/