In the Pottery Barn Kids catalog baby name comments, Kaz wondered about people naming their kids after IKEA furniture.
That reminded me of an article I saw last year about how IKEA comes up with their product names. Whether you use one of their names, adapt their naming strategy to a language that's already supported by your keyboard, or just entertain your friends with your Jeopardy!-like wisdom, here is Margaret Marks's translation of the elaborate IKEA product naming conventions, which was originally published in Stern magazine:
Upholstered furniture, coffee tables, rattan furniture, bookshelves, media storage, doorknobs: Swedish placenames
Beds, wardrobes, hall furniture: Norwegian placenames
Dining tables and chairs: Finnish placenames
Bookcase ranges: Occupations
Bathroom articles: Scandinavian lakes, rivers and bays
Kitchens: grammatical terms, sometimes also other names
Chairs, desks: menís names
Materials, curtains: womenís names
Garden furniture: Swedish islands
Carpets: Danish placenames
Lighting: terms from music, chemistry, meteorology, measures, weights, seasons, months, days, boats, sailorsí language
Bedlinen, bedcovers, pillows/cushions: flowers, plants, precious stones
Childrenís items: mammals, birds, adjectives
Curtain accessories: mathematical and geometrical terms
Kitchen utensils (cutlery, crockers, textiles, glass, porcelain, tablecloths, candles, serviettes, decorative articles, vases etc.): foreign words, spices, herbs, fish, mushrooms, fruits or berries, functional descriptions
Boxes, wall decoration, pictures and frames, clocks: colloquial expressions, also Swedish placenames
Where IKEA Gets the Names [transblawg]
Waren Sie schon mal in Klippan? [stern.de, although you don't need to know German to understand "IKEA ist kult."]
IKEA USA products A-Z [ikea.com]
When I was pregnant with my second baby a friend of mine and I went to Ikea to get baby furniture and I won my entire purchase thanks to a summer promotion. Woot woot! We decided that we should name the baby after an Ikea item, but I couldn't find anything I liked. Klippan? Tassa? Eh ... Niva is ok, but imagine explaining it to everyone the rest of your life. "Hi! I'm named after a cardboard lamp!"