You’ll Never Guess What Amazon Was Almost Called—and Why They Had to Change the Name

Before Amazon became the world's largest online shopping site, there were several different contenders for names—and if you type some of them, you'll still get to the Amazon homepage!

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In the online shopping days when we can even order groceries in our PJs, it’s hard to remember a world without Amazon. But amazon.com almost never existed—or at least with that name.

At first, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos called his e-commerce company (at that point just a bookseller) Cadabra Inc. The name was a play off “abracadabra” to show how magical online shopping was. But after a lawyer misheard the name as “cadaver,” Bezos figured he should rebrand, according to Mashable.

A bit of brainstorming led Bezos to relentless.com—a name he and his wife were crazy about, according to Business Insider. Friends told him Relentless sounded unfriendly, but Bezos still bought the domain name in 1994. To this day, if you type relentless.com into your browser, you’ll go straight to the Amazon homepage. Seriously, try it! (Just don’t add these items you shouldn’t buy online to your cart) Same goes for browse.com and awake.com, two other names Bezos considered.

He also came up with the name Aard, with the pure intention of making it to the top of alphabetical lists. Before the days of Google’s complex algorithms, some search engines would arrange links alphabetically, so having an “A” name would be a definite advantage.

Finally, Bezos settled on Amazon. For one thing, he could still keep his company at the top of the alphabet. But borrowing the name of the world’s longest river was supposed to evoke how huge it would be, according to Mashable. After all, the site’s tagline was “Earth’s biggest bookstore” when it started—back before you could read books online for free.

Next time you browse Amazon, make sure to take advantage of these ways to save money when online shopping.

Marissa Laliberte
Marissa Laliberte-Simonian is a London-based associate editor with the global promotions team at WebMD’s Medscape.com and was previously a staff writer for Reader's Digest. Her work has also appeared in Business Insider, Parents magazine, CreakyJoints, and the Baltimore Sun. You can find her on Instagram @marissasimonian.