Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of company name etymologies


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete‎__EXPECTED_UNCONNECTED_PAGE__. Star  Mississippi  01:39, 4 May 2024 (UTC)

List of company name etymologies

 * – ( View AfD View log | edits since nomination)

I cannot see how this subject possibly meets the criteria in WP:notability. Searching for "how did companies get their names", there are a number of hits, but 1) most of them are blogs and forums, and 2) most of them are about a selected set of companies. I hven't found anything which treats the question as a general topic. ColinFine (talk) 16:26, 26 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. Shellwood (talk) 16:34, 26 April 2024 (UTC)


 * Comment: What about List of companies named after people? Should we keep that page, delete it or redirect List of company name etymologies to it? BlakeIsHereStudios (talk &#124; contributions) 18:21, 26 April 2024 (UTC)


 * Comment This list contains mainly WP:PRIMARY as the source to the companies. However, I do think this can meet WP:LISTN if the list is trimmed to source-able material. I have found the topic to be notable per, , as well as and to some extent .Conyo14 (talk) 20:08, 26 April 2024 (UTC)
 * I looked at the first (Business Insider) of these four and I'm not impressed. For "Amazon": "Bezos reportedly wanted a name that began with 'A' so it would appear near the top of an alphabetical list". Uh-huh: if he'd chosen "Advance", say, it would have been a lot nearer. Ah, but there was another reason: "He thought the world's largest river was an apt name for what he hoped could be its biggest business." Even granting that the man was and is ambitious, hoping to sell rivers boggles the mind. And something else was meant, then what? None of these etymologies in this Business Insider thing is sourced, suggesting that they could be merely write-ups of office water-cooler chitchat. -- Hoary (talk) 00:10, 27 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Ok Conyo14 (talk) 00:26, 27 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Why would one reliable source reference other reliable sources? They do research themselves, they don't just make things up.   D r e a m Focus  16:35, 27 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Because,, the particular "reliable source" (web page) doesn't look to me as if it's a reliable source. Its content seems sloppily thought out and sloppily written up. (And this is hardly surprising: see Reliable sources/Perennial sources.) -- Hoary (talk) 21:52, 30 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Keep Notable aspect of a company that gets coverage. 176 references in the article so far, some of them are valid, plus the articles linked to will mention how the companies got their names.   D r e a m Focus  04:44, 27 April 2024 (UTC)
 * I'm not convinced that LISTN is met, but I think the best solution is to purge and move to company name, where patterns in choices of company name can be discussed. (t &#183; c)  buidhe  15:30, 27 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Delete I struggle to imagine what the scenario is here. Are we assuming that anyone, ever, who was curious about the origin of the name of a company thought "Hey, instead of just looking up the name of the company and reading that article, I will type in "List of company name etymologies" and then search for it there"?  The point was also made on the talk page that this technically is not etymology at all, which our own article defines as is the scientific study of the origin and evolution of a word's semantic meaning across time not "Earnst & Young is named after two guys, one was Earnst and the other was Young". So it isn't even what it says it is, much of it is unsourced, and the general concept of how companies get their names has not been demonstrated to be a notable subject. Deletion is the logical outcome here. Just Step Sideways from this world ..... today 20:42, 29 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Comment. While I was the proposer of this deletion, I don't think that Just Step Sideways's arguments are germane. See WP:WEDONTNEEDIT for the first one, and for the second, that might be an argument to retitle the list (though I don't think it is) but it is not relevant to whether to delete it or not.
 * ColinFine (talk) 21:29, 29 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Parts of this could indeed be added to Company name, if some onomastically-informed person cared to create such an article. (I'm not qualified.) Failing that, delete in accordance with the nomination. -- Hoary (talk) 22:02, 30 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Delete There's a difference between a well-sourced encyclopedic topic and internet click-bait. Editors here should not have to struggle to tell the difference. We don't have topics on Things People Don't Know About Air Fryers or Habits Cat-Owners Have that Dog-Owners Don't even though you'll find those topics have also been written about, countless times, in various publications. Fails our criteria for notability and fails WP:LISTN.  HighKing++ 09:57, 3 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Delete as listcruft. No evidence that this is independently notable in any real sense. Poor quality journalistic filler about a few arbitrary 'famous' names doesn't make the entire topic significant. People give many things (material and immaterial) names, as a matter of course. Doing so for companies is nothing special. And as an aside, I'd have to suggest that etymology, properly defined, has nothing much to do with the subject. AndyTheGrump (talk) 10:34, 3 May 2024 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.