Image to come: the Amazon River seen from above.
Cadabra
“Why is a shop named after a river?”
In July 1994 Jeff Bezos registered a new company in Washington State to sell books online. He called it Cadabra, Inc., from abracadabra, because he wanted shopping on the internet to feel like magic.
The magic did not survive a phone call. When Bezos told his lawyer the name, the lawyer heard cadaver, a dead body. A company name that sounds like a corpse over the telephone is a problem, so Bezos went looking for another. He liked “Relentless” for a while too.
He found his answer by reading through the dictionary. Amazon was the largest river in the world, which suited a shop that promised to be “Earth’s biggest book store”. It also began with A. In the early web, many lists of websites were alphabetical, so a name near the start of the alphabet appeared near the top.
The company became Amazon.com a few months after it was founded, and opened for business in 1995.
Look closer: Google’s name came from a typing slip. Amazon’s came from a mishearing.