Names of some well-known companies that actually are abbreviations

Fun facts about brand names

Names of some well-known companies are actually abbreviations, not acronyms:

• Adidas = Adi (shortened name Adolf) Dassler is the founder's name. An “All Day I Dream About Sports” decryption appeared much later, but in fact it is a backronym, i.e. a fictional interpretation of an already existing abbreviation. It's worth noting that Adolf's older brother, Rudolf, named his company in a similar way Ruda (Rudolf Dassler), but that name “didn't work,” and he renamed it to Puma.
• Auchan = deliberately inaccurate recording of French words Hauts champs (High Fields) referring to the name of the Roubaix quarter, where the first store of this retail chain was opened. The bird depicted on the emblem is a reference to the birds singing (au chant in French), and the bird itself is a magpie.
• Cisco is derived from the name of the city of San Francisco. Thus, during first years of its existence, the company's engineers insisted that this word should be written lowercase: cisco.
• Electrolux is formed by merging the names of the Swedish companies AB Elektromekaniska and AB Lux. The latter was engaged in the production of kerosene lamps, and Lux refers to a lux, an illuminance measurement unit.
• Intel = Integrated Electronics.
• Lego = leg godt — “play well” in Danish. Over time, the name began to be stylized as an abbreviation and written in capital letters — LEGO.
• Pepsi got its name from the digestive enzyme pepsin: at the end of the 19th century they believed that such a name would be associated with good digestion. Interesting fact is that pepsin was not even a part of the drink.
• Skype: initially, the name Skyper was formed from the “sky peer-to-peer” phrase — it was meant that users would contact each other directly. However, it turned out that domain names with the word skyper were already taken. Then r was simply discarded.
• Tefal = teflon + aluminium. The Tefal company was founded in 1956 to produce cookware with a non-stick coating based on Teflon (a.k.a. polytetrafluoroethylene, a.k.a. PTFE, a.k.a. fluoroplastic-4), when they found a way to apply it to an aluminum surface.
• Verizon = veritas (Latin for truth) + horizon. 
• Vodafone = Voice Data and Fone (i.e. telephone).