Amazing. A post asks a question in the title that I actually want answered, and then goes on to answer that question clearly and succinctly. Maybe the best corporate content I've seen this year.
But how can I find the answer to the question without reading punchy headers followed by paragraphs like
> How We Leverage Naming
> Our Naming Strategy, Explained
> Why Swedish Is Important
> The Bottom Line
And unforgettable aphorisms like
> It isn't just a name—it is the output of a scalable, globally coordinated, linguistically validated, Swedish-inspired naming framework designed to optimize brand consistency
to let me know? I'm completely lost on this page and can't find the answer without these.
> Ingvar Kamprad, founder of IKEA, had a hard time remembering numbers and numbers
And also numbers I assume. Does it mean something like “endless stream of numbers”?
I’m very surprised that they have 2000-3000 new products every year. Checking every name against every language of countries they operate in to avoid “bad” names must be a pain.
The Swedish version of the page just says "siffror" (literally "digits", but colloquially "numbers") once.
I'm not aware of any relevant Swedish expression that would repeat the same word like that. Maybe something like "siffror och tal", where both words could be translated as "numbers" by someone not paying attention to the resulting sentence. :)
Swedish does naturally use a lot of letters with umlauts (e.g. a common plural suffix -är), so a noun with a special letter is usually not hard to come by, and looks more Swedish (than, say, Dutch or English, which are sort of cousin languages).
Those are the letters we have that are distinct from English. Not exotic to us, but yeah, "weird letters" is probably considered part of the international brand now.
By the way, we consider them unique letters, not A and O with diacritics.
Just to make things worse, the Scandinavian languages use different versions of what have historically been the same letters, and collate them differently. E.g. Norwegian has æ (Ä), ø (Ö), å, collated in that order. Technically the Swedish variants are not part of the Norwegian alphabet, but they're typically collated with their modern Norwegian equivalents.
At least in Norwegian, ae, oe, and aa is also traditionally collated as if they were using these letters, so a word starting "aa" comes at the end of the alphabet, after z, oe and ae....
But they are on different keys on keyboards, annoyingly, leading to one "ÖÆØ" key and one "ÄØÆ" key on Scandinavian keyboards (not to mention the horrible "½§§§½|" key!).
I lived in Sweden in the late nineties. The local phone book had my Dutch name sorted under the V & W section because it has the word 'van' (means of in English) in it. In the Netherlands my name would be in the G section (van Gurp) because otherwise most of the phone book would have to be sorted under the V, which would defeat the purpose of sorting.
I guess it helps with emphasizing their Swedish identity, which is one of their goals with naming. Doesn't gel too well with "feels good to say" for a non-native speaker, but I see their point.
Yeah, given they sell to every continent, I find it utterly impossible they truly tested this with each of the dozens to hundreds of languages their customers speak.
Not sure why, but when I see certain diacritics with latin alphabet, my brain tries to place the language somewhere in Europe. I don't know if I can call that an exotic feeling but it certainly feels foreign.
Most likely. In the early 90s there was a knock-off of Ikea called Stør which used the ø for exoticism. I had assumed that it was a Danish company, but apparently, not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STØR (The store where I bought some of my first furniture from—off the 60 in City of Industry—was quite possibly the original location).
Stør was really blatant to the extent that they were successfully sued by IKEA for their duplication. They were eventually bought out by IKEA, probably for the real estate.
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?
its 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?
Nitpicking 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.
GNOME 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.
The 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.
Every 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?
Funnily 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.)
The Tornedalen people are kinda their own group with their own language (Meänkieli). To an outsider it might sound like Finnish, but it's not much closer to Finnish than Yiddish is to German.
Not so sure. As a native Finnish speaker, I'd say most of us would understand Meänkieli just fine, especially anyone raised on the coastal areas where colloquial Swedish loans are more common in general.
Meänkieli split from what became the Torne Valley dialects of Finnish in 1809, when an international border suddenly appeared in the middle of the region. To a Finnish speaker it sounds like a bit old-fashioned dialect, but it's mostly intelligible. It's definitely closer to standard Finnish than Karelian, which takes a lot of effort to understand.
You really wanna get weird, there's those continents of Asia, Africa, and South America, full of different sounds to use for names. Ikea is Swedish, so they get to propagate Swedish culture to the rest of the world.
Has anyone else noticed that Ikea meatballs aren’t as tasty as they used to be? And then there’s that whole issue of there being, like, 4 different types, and none of them seem to be what they sound like.
I can just imagine Chinese IKEA, their entire product list would be Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shìshì Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shíshì Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī Shì shì shì shì.
You 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 (Jun 2025).
Ikea 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.
It'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.
I 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.
Well, 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.
As 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"
Some I don't get but are still funny
Ostbit - wooden serving tongs called "piece of cheese"?
I'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 :))
> Every possible product name is carefully checked to avoid undesirable meanings in other languages, political or religious affiliations and fit into our global profile.
I love the JERKER desk that I bought 26 years ago, so I assume this rule must be younger than that.
Pax is another one that violates the rule that someone pointed out lower. Also Malm is a surname which is another violation of the rule (one of the characters in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was named, if I recall correctly, Stefan Malm). I remember reading the books with my then-wife and she said it was like reading an IKEA catalog. I thought she was referring to the character/place names, but it turned out that the second book had a long section where the titular girl furnishes an apartment from IKEA and—that chapter was exactly like reading an IKEA catalog.
When it comes to names like "MALM", it's likely incidental.
"Malm" is a a noun with several meanings, most notably "metal ore", but also some (more archaic) meanings like "area with sandy soil" or "city outskirts".
The fact that "Malm" also happens to be a surname is secondary; Swedish has a lot of surnames that are simply ordinary nouns or adjectives. A completely literal "No surnames, ever" rule would probably be quite a bit too restrictive. I suspect that the actual internal rule is "No names that are primarily (or solely) surnames", or something to that effect.
Currently 6833 people in Sweden have the last name "Malm", and some large fraction of them were born before 2005 (could not be bothered to check how many, sorry!).
Similar trivia with a Swedish connection: the original name of the Honda Fit/Jazz was Honda Fitta, but then they found out it's the Swedish word for "cunt" so that was a no-go.
I didn’t even know the name for the longest time. It’s only when I wanted to buy some extensions that I realized the cult status of that model, and that’s not (just) because of the name. It’s a truly great design and a shame that it was discontinued many years ago.
Yes, they also sold a toilet brush named "VIREN". In Germany this is the plural of virus.
And some year ago Danes complained IKEA named carpets and runner after danish towns but never something "better".
I'm a Swede and I knew a guy named Jerker growing up. I always wondered if his parents gave him that name to mess with him. In Swedish "j" is pronounced as the English "y", so I think they could have at least spelled it as Yerker.
That's my name. When I asked my parents about it, they just said they liked it and didn't really think about any possible negative sides.
Introducing yourself to English speakers can be interesting... often times people won't catch the name when pronounced the Swedish way, so you end up quickly clarifying it by using the English pronunciation. Sometimes a hand gesture is needed.
The thing is that recent products are crappy. I got so many decades old secondhand things. They looked like regular old furniture and it was fine. Then I continued buying same things, but new. While the old furniture didn’t change at all the new pieces became yellow/brown after couple tears. We don’t smoke!!! It was a nightmare and I don’t buy IKEA products anymore.
Is also a Swedish word, though slang, the imperative form of paxa which basically means the same as "dibs!" If I know my english colloquialisms correctly.
> Every possible product name is carefully checked to avoid undesirable meanings in other languages, political or religious affiliations and fit into our global profile.
> Did you know that we name around 2,000-3,000 new products every year?
I find this surprisingly high; I guess it’s _products_ and not _names_, meaning that five colors of the same product count as five new products but only one name.
They don't just sell furnitures, there is all the small accessories like cutting boards, plates, bowls, towels, cushions... Everything they're selling at their lowest floor before you reach the self-serve warehouse.
Also they insist on replacing perfectly good products to sell inferior ones (for bigger margins I guess).
Every visitor rave about and ask us where we bought our corkscrew but we can only reply it was in IKEA but they decided they are too good for us so replaced them with inferior ones. Same happened wuth a vegetable peeler that I let go when I divorced but should have fought for because I never found one as good and IKEA enshittification made sure I can't buy it again.
I love how the chose Verde, which means value, for their long time retired kitchen furniture. They were so good that they actually sell above their original retail prices now.
Sadly the materials in the lack changed over time, the insides are basically just cardboard honeycomb with a thin veneer around it.
So if you want to follow the lack mods on the web, especially ones written in the 2010s, you need to make sure you strengthen the legs to accommodate the hardware
This is so random. I had just pulled this exact page up this morning to settle a debate with coworkers over whether the product names were real Swedish words or not. I thought they were all made up!
Was very surprised to find things like “bookshelves are all men’s names”, “all names must have ä, å, or ö”, etc.
Complete coincidence that this is #2 today. Had to check that ’NaOH’ wasn’t one of my coworkers
When [3] contains half as many as [2] it should be a good sign to take pause to consider both could be faaaar from exhaustive. [1] is just a link to a page of links, it doesn't really say anything about how many total named products there are.
https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/ranjithpanicker/ikea-global-... claims "34,932 unique global products". I don't know how exhaustive or accurately deduplicated it is either, but it lines up with about what I'd expect from the above 1st party quote enough. As a result, I'm going to err on the side of Ikea having better info about their catalog than a naming wiki and some dude's personal site before declaring them fools.
I’m going to guess that a good chunk of products are named but never released. I’d love to know what products IKEA develops but decides to not release.
If you ever find yourself in southern Sweden (or Copenhagen and fancy a train ride across a cool bridge) the IKEA museum at Älmhult is well worth a visit: https://ikeamuseum.com/en/
I was there three days ago, can comfirm. And if you want to stay overnight, you _of course_ sleep in the neighbouring IKEA Hotel! And if you check-in to the hotel first, you‘ll get a voucher for free entrance to the museum. Did I mention that an absolutely excellent breakfast is included in the very reasonable room rate?
And in case you visit the museum in the near future, they currently have a special (temporary) exhibition about IKEA's founder, Ingvar Kamprad, who was a very creative but also exceptionally socially and environmentally responsible entrepreneur. Nice contrast to today's appalling tech billionaires.
305 comments
[ 0.31 ms ] story [ 7.5 ms ] thread> How We Leverage Naming
> Our Naming Strategy, Explained
> Why Swedish Is Important
> The Bottom Line
And unforgettable aphorisms like
> It isn't just a name—it is the output of a scalable, globally coordinated, linguistically validated, Swedish-inspired naming framework designed to optimize brand consistency
to let me know? I'm completely lost on this page and can't find the answer without these.
The names just hit different.
https://about.iceland.co.uk/our-story/the-dark-ages/beware-m...
Submit it to Hacker News as its own post before I do.
Seriously.
You have one hour.
I’m bookmarking it for sharing
And also numbers I assume. Does it mean something like “endless stream of numbers”?
I’m very surprised that they have 2000-3000 new products every year. Checking every name against every language of countries they operate in to avoid “bad” names must be a pain.
I'm not aware of any relevant Swedish expression that would repeat the same word like that. Maybe something like "siffror och tal", where both words could be translated as "numbers" by someone not paying attention to the resulting sentence. :)
I always thought it's just a natural consequence of using Swedish language, turns out it's on purpose!
I'm 100% för this.
Yes, but why prefer these letters?
I don’t know Swedish. Is it because these diacritics make the names seem more exotic?
A møøse once bit my sister...
of course. Haagen Dazs, Motorhead, etc have known it loooong ago
By the way, we consider them unique letters, not A and O with diacritics.
In Hungarian it's A, Á, B, C, Cs, D, Dz, Dzs, E, É, F... So Cu--- comes before Cs---
A B C Č D Ď E F G H Ch I J…
• „če“ goes after both „ca“ and „ci“, but „ác“ goes between „ab“ and „ad“
• „cha“ goes after „da“ and „ha“
At least in Norwegian, ae, oe, and aa is also traditionally collated as if they were using these letters, so a word starting "aa" comes at the end of the alphabet, after z, oe and ae....
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71OSnDl45vL.jpg
IKEA sold that too: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/306072403869
We have one called jysk... They're doing alright.
Definately more fun would be the Polish version. How many people can pronounce the BYDGOSZCZ sofa, the PRZEMYSŁAW bookcase and the PSZCZOŁA soft toy?
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_...
E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs
I mean.. we have the Windsor Chair (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windsor_chair) and the Welsh Dresser (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_dresser) and those both slightly predate ikea so it's not a new thing.
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.
This may not even be that far off from reality, looking at the sort of names rando brands on Amazon often have...
* I'm sure it's not exactly the same, but people appreciate the effort of getting 90% of the way there by doing that.
MAUL HALTEN!
https://youtu.be/AfKZclMWS1U
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.
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.
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"
Some I don't get but are still funny
Ostbit - wooden serving tongs called "piece of cheese"?
(I'd read it as БИЂОШЧ/БИДГОШЧ, ПРЗЕМИСЛАВ and ПШЧОЛА/ПШЧОЉА — you can check on Google Translate if I am close :))
- https://xaocdevices.com/main/
- https://xaocdevices.com/main/koszalin/
I love the JERKER desk that I bought 26 years ago, so I assume this rule must be younger than that.
The same way "Brown" is common surname in English but mostly makes you think of the color first
"Malm" is a a noun with several meanings, most notably "metal ore", but also some (more archaic) meanings like "area with sandy soil" or "city outskirts".
The fact that "Malm" also happens to be a surname is secondary; Swedish has a lot of surnames that are simply ordinary nouns or adjectives. A completely literal "No surnames, ever" rule would probably be quite a bit too restrictive. I suspect that the actual internal rule is "No names that are primarily (or solely) surnames", or something to that effect.
Girl with the dragon tattoo was released in 2005
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_Pajero
I heard a guy nearby telling the person with him "must be for the interns".
Took me several seconds to get it.
I guess at the time the name was funny too but I had forgotten it.
Introducing yourself to English speakers can be interesting... often times people won't catch the name when pronounced the Swedish way, so you end up quickly clarifying it by using the English pronunciation. Sometimes a hand gesture is needed.
Ikea used to make somewhat reasonable and affordable products, that, in total were much higher quality than their price point suggested.
Now they are just cheap, on almost every metric.
PAX
https://www.ikea.com/de/en/cat/pax-system-19086/
It reminds some system - they didn’t allow “other” category for sorting features, but someone came with “999” :)
Hey Donna [1]...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T2oje4cYxw
I find this surprisingly high; I guess it’s _products_ and not _names_, meaning that five colors of the same product count as five new products but only one name.
Every visitor rave about and ask us where we bought our corkscrew but we can only reply it was in IKEA but they decided they are too good for us so replaced them with inferior ones. Same happened wuth a vegetable peeler that I let go when I divorced but should have fought for because I never found one as good and IKEA enshittification made sure I can't buy it again.
I think "being as widely-understandable pun as possible" is definitely one of their naming priorities.
https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/vuku-wardrobe-white-80331973/
Need an end table that is lacking?
https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/lack-side-table-white-30449908/
End table? That’s a server rack: https://wiki.eth0.nl/index.php/List_of_IkeaRacks
https://www.printables.com/model/76318-ikea-lack-enclosure-3...
So if you want to follow the lack mods on the web, especially ones written in the 2010s, you need to make sure you strengthen the legs to accommodate the hardware
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T2oje4cYxw
https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/nattbad-bluetooth-speaker-yello...
Was very surprised to find things like “bookshelves are all men’s names”, “all names must have ä, å, or ö”, etc.
Complete coincidence that this is #2 today. Had to check that ’NaOH’ wasn’t one of my coworkers
Translation:
https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/p/fraeck-mirror-stainless-steel-3...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dwarf#Hallmarks - a brief explanation
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzvXWl2UxXc - a compilation of all smegs in Red Dwarf
It's more likely that the whole product catalog contains 2-3k products. [1][2][3] So no, you don't.
[1] https://www.ikea.com/us/en/cat/products-products [2] https://lar5.com/ikea (~ 2200) [3] https://namingschemes.com/Ikea_Product_Names (~ 1300)
https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/ranjithpanicker/ikea-global-... claims "34,932 unique global products". I don't know how exhaustive or accurately deduplicated it is either, but it lines up with about what I'd expect from the above 1st party quote enough. As a result, I'm going to err on the side of Ikea having better info about their catalog than a naming wiki and some dude's personal site before declaring them fools.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4si8w8WMFc
(Rob Paravonian - Particle Board) - of Dr. Demento, etc., fame.
Any speakers of either language able to confirm or deny?
https://www.ikeahotell.com/en/about-us/
https://www.fastcompany.com/91529069/what-its-like-to-stay-i...
British lad giving a review/tour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trcUc9ILYqI