Along the same lines, I was very surprised to learn "sandwich" was named after its inventor! (Earl of Sandwich.) Guy literally invented the sandwich and had it named after him.
Things Unexpectedly Named After People
111–120 of 294 posts
Re: Things Unexpectedly Named After People
#112Folks may remember a game called Supreme Commander. One of the big 'experimental class' artillery is called a Mavor. Jonathan Mavor, was one of the developers.
GoldenEye had the Klobb gun, named for Ken Lobb.
Re: Things Unexpectedly Named After People
#113America is named after Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian explorer who was pretty sure America was a separate continent - pretty random !
Re: Things Unexpectedly Named After People
#114Suitland and Beltsville, MD - suburbs of DC named after local landowners, Samuel T. Suit and Truman Belt.
Re: Things Unexpectedly Named After People
#115The health assessment Apgar Score, named for its inventor Dr Virginia Apgar, but frequently assumed to be an acronym/initialisation and spelled as APGAR.
Re: Things Unexpectedly Named After People
#116The gold standard for scientific trials is named after a professor named Harry Gold. And the Johari window is named after two guys named Joe and Harry.
Can you provide a citation for Harry Gold? All I find is a chemist convicted of spying for the Soviets.
I find [1] which outright declares the etymology is from the economic term, and that it was popularized in medicine by Peter Rudd in 1979, or from a 1962 punning usage referring to literal gold salts.
The economic sense of a gold specie currency has uses going back to at least 1764 [3][4][5].
1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC557893/
2: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/299414/where-doe...
3: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?corpus=15&smoothing=3&...
4: From 1767 https://www.google.com/books/edition/An_Inquiry_Into_the_Pri...
5: From 1764 https://www.google.com/books/edition/Ames_Library_Pamphlet_C...
Re: Things Unexpectedly Named After People
#117I find this post and comments to be surprisingly delightful. I'll aggregate the scattered gems in the comments here: - Sideburns : Named after the American Civil War general Ambrose Burnside. - Heaviside function (a mathematical step function) : named after Oliver Heaviside - The Children's python (animal) : Named after John George Children. - Snowflake, AZ : Named after Erastus Snow and William Jordon Flake. - Lake…
Nice. As an aside, how do you pronounce Heaviside? Is it hevy-side or heevy-side or...?
Re: Things Unexpectedly Named After People
#118The color #663399 is named "rebeccapurple", after Rebecca Meyer, who passed away at age 6. https://css-tricks.com/rebbeccapurple-663399/ was unexpected to me when i first learned CSS, and now is a bittersweet memory i gladly pass on.
Heartbreaking but what a wonderful way to memorialize her. Thanks for sharing.
Re: Things Unexpectedly Named After People
#119German Chocolate Cake owes its name to an English-American chocolate maker named Samuel German.
You might make your German Chocolate Cake with Baker's Chocolate, a popular American brand of baking chocolate, named for Dr. William Baker, who founded a chocolate importing company.
Re: Things Unexpectedly Named After People
#120Current Day Turkey – Used to be called Constantinople, named after Constantine. Originally named Byzantium after Byzas from Megara.