Häagen-Dazs — Simply two made-up words meant to look European to American eyes. This is known in the marketing industry as foreign branding.

Hotmail — They tried all sorts of names ending in 'mail' and finally settled for Hotmail as it included the letters "HTML" (the markup language used to write web pages). It was originally referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casing.

Yahoo! — The Web site started out as "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" but eventually received a new moniker with the help of a dictionary. The name Yahoo! is an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they liked the general definition of a yahoo: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth."