Etymology of Google

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hello, who’s this?

This is Rabia.

Hi, Rabia. Where are you calling from?

I’m calling from Richmond, Virginia.

Welcome to the show. How can we help you?

Oh, well, I’ve been thinking of this word, and I thought I would give you guys a call about it.

So my question is about the word Google, and I wanted to know that if this word existed the pre-internet era, and if so, what was the meaning of this word at that time?

And, you know, I did Google the word Google, and I could not really find a clear-cut answer about this.

So I just thought I’d give you guys a call.

You know, it involves a couple of different stories.

First of all, it involves a professor at Columbia named Edward Kastner, who back in the 1940s wrote a book called Mathematics and the Imagination.

It’s a book that is written for a lay audience.

And in fact, it was so popular that it became a bestseller.

Really?

Yeah.

And it’s a fun book.

It’s actually easy to read and it’s got a lot of humor in it.

But one of the things that he mentions in that book is that he was trying to think of a name for a really big number, like 10 to the 100th power, which is one with 100 zeros behind it.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

Okay.

He was trying to come up with a word for this really big number.

And so he turned to his nephew, who was about eight or nine years old, his nephew Milton, and said, what should I call this number?

And the little boy thought for a little bit.

And then he said, call it Google.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

But he spelled it G-O-O-G-O-L, which I think is a great word for a number with all those zeros.

So then fast forward to 1997 and the guys at Stanford University who had just come up with this great search engine that they were developing further.

They were trying to come up with a name for that.

And the original name for it was Backrub, if you can believe it.

Really? Backrub?

Backrub?

Yeah, that was the original name for this search engine because they had this great idea of using backlinks from websites to rank the websites.

And so they were calling it BackRub and they thought, no, we need a better name for this.

And so mathematicians had adopted the word Google and also used the word Googleplex, which is an infinitely, almost infinitely.

So that’s Google to the power of Google?

Ten to the power of Google.

Oh, ten to the power of Google.

Which is just this insanely large number.

So one of them suggests the number Googleplex, and they said, no, it’s pretty good.

But then they shortened it to Google and apparently misspelled it when they were registering the domain name.

But it stuck.

Yeah.

Now, there is one other Google, though, right?

You mean googly eyes?

Barney Google?

Well, I’m thinking of the cricket Google.

The cricket Google?

Yeah.

I don’t know the cricket Google.

Well, the cricket Googly.

Oh, the Googly.

Yes, I’m aware of that.

Yeah, so you follow cricket?

I’m aware of the googly in cricket because I do watch cricket.

Oh, I thought he meant the insect.

No, no.

But you mean the game.

Okay, of course.

Yeah, so to throw a googly is to Google.

And they’re unrelated, but I thought it worth mentioning here.

So can you tell us what a googly is in cricket?

Yes, please explain it.

So, you know, you play cricket with a bat and a ball.

So it’s a specific type of way you throw the ball towards a bat.

So it’s a style of bowling, basically.

And so the ball breaks in a certain way, right?

It kind of does this little dip or something?

It’s hard to describe, but let me tell you this.

This style of bowling was invented by a bowler from Pakistan, and I’m from there.

So that’s how I know about it.

Very good.

I thought it was worth mentioning this other googly.

And so if somebody throws a googly, they are a Googler, but it’s not related.

Yeah, different Google.

Different Google.

So complicated history here.

Yeah.

Interesting.

The short version is that Google, spelled G-O-O-G-O-L, is the name of a huge number.

And the search engine is spelled a little bit differently.

Yeah.

So how about that?

Well, it sounds good.

So now I know.

Thank you.

We’re really glad you called, Ravia.

Thank you so much.

All right.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

I think that there’s a whole world of questions that we can answer about English, Martha.

Indeed.

We’ll just Google it.

Maybe we should give people our phone number so they can call with their questions.

Oh, that’s a good idea.

Let’s see.

How about 877-929-9673?

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