It is not very difficult to understand why the name of Pinterest was coined this way. The history of its origin is however less known.
What do Pixar, Wikipedia, Logitech, DeepMind, Intel, Bitcoin or WhatsApp have in common, apart from their presence in our section on tech names? It’s very simple: their name is a portmanteau word between two common names, in order to describe their purpose. For example, Bitcoin combines the terms “bit” and “coin”, that is to say a unit of measurement in computer science and “coin”.
A name found while watching TV
Why are we telling you all this? Because that’s exactly how the name Pinterest was coined. It is also a portmanteau word associating the terms of “Pin”, or “Pinboard”, with “interest”. In English, these words translate respectively as “pin”, “pin board” and “center of interest”. And that’s pretty good, because that’s the central principle of Pinterest.
The general idea of this site, which dates back to 2010, is to give Internet users the possibility of pinning ideas, just as one could do on a large cork board. You can pin all kinds of resources online, be it pictures, cooking recipes, decoration, and so on. In short, anything that inspires or pleases you.
This reference to the cork board on which various things are pinned is found in a subtle way in the logo of the company. Indeed, the letter “P”, which takes the first letter of the name of the company, is styled to evoke a pin – the bar of the “P” forms the metal rod, while its loop represents its head.
Pinterest was founded by former Google employee Ben Silbermann and Paul Sciarra, along with Evan Sharp, through their company Cold Brew Labs Inc. Yet it was neither Ben, nor Paul, nor Evan who had the idea of the name: it was Ben’s wife, Divya Bhaskaran, who had this stroke of genius, and in a completely banal way: according to the anecdote reported by Business Insider, she was watching television .
