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?
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"
Knöckla - A garbage bin called "crumple up"
Some I don't get but are still funny
Ostbit - wooden serving tongs called "piece of cheese"?
I guess you can use the tongs to serve pieces of cheese.
> BYDGOSZCZ sofa
This may not even be that far off from reality, looking at the sort of names rando brands on Amazon often have...
No joke, I came across a cosmetics brand recently called "Pooplunch"
Genius strategy for earning organic social media
At least BYDGOSZCZ is a real word in a real language
Place looks pretty nice, too.
Note to self: Change WiFi password, some bastard has posted it to HN for everyone to see.
If the goal is something that reads weird for most Europeans, then try picking names from Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, or Welsh.
My missus is Hungarian, I'm sure it's a lovely language but it just sounds like Klingon to me.
Which makes it hilarious when she's annoyed at the boy.
The fact that Sz in Hungarian reads as s and other way around, S becomes sh - is mind-boggling especially for Poles, where Sz is pronounced as sh. and S remains s.
Wait for the Italian where "cc" makes a "ch" sound and "ch" is "k"
* When followed by e or i.
In Spanish "z" always sounds [s] (except in Spain where it sounds [θ]), but "s" can often sound [z].
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.
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.
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.
Basque would be truly weird since it is one of a few known language isolates
Now I want a HÉTFŐ desk, and a SZÉKESFEHÉRVÁR... something.
Imagine an alternative reality where a KALLAX is a ԿԱԼԼԱՔՍ and the stores have pushy salesmen with impressive amounts of visible chest hair.
the joke is a bit too hairy to my taste, and yet I can't help but imagine how good would be the restaurant in that reality!
I heard the raktajino is really good! Qapla'!
Their ads could star the Kardashians.
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.
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.
With a side of tasty meatballs.
I've had tasty meatballs. It was the lingonberry sauce that I was introduced from Ikea.
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.
Is that rule number one or two in that naming things are hard?
How about eating a Sandwich with Turkey, Bologna and Cheddar, maybe with a Paris-Brest for dessert?
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?
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 :))
Just go to Polish IKEA and buy the Grzegorz table and Brzęczyszczykiewicz chairs …
> Brzęczyszczykiewicz
MAUL HALTEN!
For everybody who's as lost as I was, the above is a quote from a 1970 polish movie:
https://youtu.be/AfKZclMWS1U
It is kind of funny sometimes. Sometimes it’s related to what the thing is (like a pun) and sometimes just random
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.
You lived in SF and never once went to LA?!
It is fun to see the familiar Los Santos locations.
Would also be more fitting as most of it is made in Poland.
IKEA Poland missed an opportunity here
Tak
> CROYDON sofa
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.
Ok porridge drawer is definitely someone having a laff
Nope. Real Scots history. See also ‘piece’
Don't forget the Chesterfield!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Electron
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.
The German vowels are a good start, but Swedish pronunciation is of course a little bit vowel shifted from German.
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).
Every startup is named like these though so it is sorta biased.
E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs