Google etymology
According to Google History, the word google derives from a technical term in mathematics:
Google is a play on the word googol, which was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, and was popularized in the book, “Mathematics and the Imagination” by Kasner and James Newman. It refers to the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. Google’s use of the term reflects the company’s mission to organize the immense, seemingly infinite amount of information available on the web.
The word, however, also has other — and older — meanings.
It appears, for instance, in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. At the beginning of chapter 29, the duke, one of the two scoundrels on the raft, plays the “deef and dumb” William Wilks, and goes “a goo-gooing around, happy and satisfied, like a jug that’s googling out buttermilk.”
I’m too lazy to consult the OED’s second edition over at the big library, but the dusty copy of its first edition, which I have within easy reach, has an entry on google which dryly refers me on to goggle. The goggle entry, then, has the familiar meaning of “to look obliquely, to squint,” but it also offers something a bit more obscure: “Onomatopoeic: an occasional substitue for GOBBLE, as suggesting a similar sound, but made more in the throat.” The earliest citation for this usage dates to the year 1611: “gulped, or goggled downe.”
Obviously, Google has gobbled most of the Web search market, but I find myself curiously intrigued by this idea of google as an onomatopoeia, a word that imitates the sound that something makes. If you listen closely to the flow of information, you’ll notice that it gluggs, gurgles, and googles as it goes.
In hard news: Google is about to become a publicly traded company shortly. According to the company’s own estimation released yesterday, their stock will be worth $3.3 Billion. That’s a lot of buttermilk googling out of the jug.
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