The Etymology of Google
The word google, both as company name and as everyday verb, traces to a single mathematical coinage. In 1920 the American mathematician Edward Kasner asked his nine-year-old nephew Milton Sirotta to invent a name for the number 10 raised to the 100th power. Milton suggested googol — a child’s playful word with no pre-existing meaning. Kasner kept it, and it appeared in his 1940 book Mathematics and the Imagination. In 1998 the Stanford graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin chose Google as the name for their search engine, intending to evoke the vastness of information they were indexing. Some accounts suggest the spelling was an accidental misspelling of googol; others say it was deliberate. The verb to google — meaning to search the web — was in widespread informal use by 2001 and was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006. It is one of the few brand names to have crossed fully into general English vocabulary as an unmarked verb, alongside hoover, xerox, and biro.