> Every possible product name is carefully checked to avoid undesirable meanings in other languages, political or religious affiliations and fit into our global profile
If I remember correctly, they had a desk named "JERKER" in early 2000s.
> In other parts of the world, they are basically incomprehensible, but fun!
For some reason unknown to either of us it really pisses off my wife when I refer to our IKEA furniture by the Swedish names. I think it stems from a deep seated disdain she has for flat pack furniture.
For a Swede it must seem kind of strange to understand the product names. You see an ACORN toy, a NIGEL bookshelf, and the CROYDON sofa... which sounds like it belongs in a council estate flat.
Definately more fun would be the Polish version. How many people can pronounce the BYDGOSZCZ sofa, the PRZEMYSŁAW bookcase and the PSZCZOŁA soft toy?
The fact that Sz in Hungarian reads as s and other way around, S becomes sh - is mind-boggling especially for Poles, where Sz is pronounced as sh. and S remains s.
Funnily enough, there are quite a few IKEA products with Finnish names. (Most are place names from northern Sweden, where there's a significant Finnish minority.)
You really wanna get weird, there's those continents of Asia, Africa, and South America, full of different sounds to use for names. Ikea is Swedish, so they get to propagate Swedish culture to the rest of the world.
I have always thought this about western media. For all of us in non-us countries, the locations, roads and objects are all slightly foreign to us, giving it that other-world feel movies have.
But for those in the US, wouldn't it all be a bit familiar? Whenever I watch a movie set in my home country with home accents and locations, it always feels a bit too familiar and it can cheapen the feel a bit.
Well, I'm an American, but US media is disproportionately set in Los Angeles or NYC, and I haven't been to either of those places.
I was watching Monk recently, and it feels kinda neat seeing a show shot in San Francisco because I used to live there. I wouldn't say it feels "cheap" though.
its not all that strange tbh - im learning danish which is adjacent enough to swedish that I can understand most of the names - sometimes they aren't relevant to the product function, sometimes they are, but they're just names. Is it strange to you that the word "photoshop" uses english language? what about a Hamburger being named after a place?
Nitpicking but your examples all have a clear etymology that may even help you deduce the purpose of a thing.
Hamburger means 'from Hamburg' and can be short for 'in the style of Hamburg', which sounds perfectly normal to a native. This is, would I say, less strange than if it was named 'Hamburg', which seems to be the case of IKEA furniture.
Photoshop, in the same way, seems to refer to a photo workshop, which once again has an etymology, as it refers to the initial purpose of that program, reworking pictures.
On the opposite, if things are just named 'for the lulz', and my desk is called Boston, my text editor 'golden retriever' and my lamp acorn, confusion may at some point arise.
GNOME used to give software applications names of common nouns that were usually not strongly related to their function: Nautilus, Palimpsest, Totem, Tomboy, Seahorse. At some point I think they decided to move away from this because they found many users had a hard time remembering the names.
Every furniture chain I’ve been in contact with have had furniture names like “Boston” and “acorn” and is “golden retriever” really that far off from Apple old OS naming scheme with snow leopards, lions and cougars?
Ikea mobile application has little speaker near the product name that invokes pronunciation - sadly, that's not available on desktop site. I still tend to read Swedish accented letters in these names as German umlauts.
So that wouldn't be a problem if Polish names would be provided with audio examples.
By the way, the communistic period here was full of products using regular words, name of places or people’s names. We had Wisła, Bieszczady wall units. First Polish color TV was Jowisz (Jupiter); first TV ever my mother had was called Szafir (Saphire). Then Szarotka (elderweis) or Sylwia radios from 50s and 60s respectively. A clone of IBM PC with Intel 8086 (or with Russian clone) from 1986 was called Mazovia - Mazowsze which is a historical region of Poland, same name was also used for DOS encoding for that machine.
You have a point but in Branding, it is accepted that bold (noisy) and distinctive (rather than only descriptive) names are an advantage: Creating billion-dollar brands: Vercel, Azure, Windsurf, Sonos, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adyIaTopO6g&t=610 (Jun 2025).
> Did you know that we name around 2,000-3,000 new products every year?
I find this surprisingly high; I guess it’s _products_ and not _names_, meaning that five colors of the same product count as five new products but only one name.
I always assumed the names were mostly random Swedish words picked for the vibe. The fact that there's a taxonomy behind them makes it much funnier somehow
> Every possible product name is carefully checked to avoid undesirable meanings in other languages, political or religious affiliations and fit into our global profile.
I love the JERKER desk that I bought 26 years ago, so I assume this rule must be younger than that.
Pax is another one that violates the rule that someone pointed out lower. Also Malm is a surname which is another violation of the rule (one of the characters in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was named, if I recall correctly, Stefan Malm). I remember reading the books with my then-wife and she said it was like reading an IKEA catalog. I thought she was referring to the character/place names, but it turned out that the second book had a long section where the titular girl furnishes an apartment from IKEA and—that chapter was exactly like reading an IKEA catalog.
When it comes to names like "MALM", it's likely incidental.
"Malm" is a a noun with several meanings, most notably "metal ore", but also some (more archaic) meanings like "area with sandy soil" or "city outskirts".
The fact that "Malm" also happens to be a surname is secondary; Swedish has a lot of surnames that are simply ordinary nouns or adjectives. A completely literal "No surnames, ever" rule would probably be quite a bit too restrictive. I suspect that the actual internal rule is "No names that are primarily (or solely) surnames", or something to that effect.
Currently 6833 people in Sweden have the last name "Malm", and some large fraction of them were born before 2005 (could not be bothered to check how many, sorry!).
Similar trivia with a Swedish connection: the original name of the Honda Fit/Jazz was Honda Fitta, but then they found out it's the Swedish word for "cunt" so that was a no-go.
Yes, they also sold a toilet brush named "VIREN". In Germany this is the plural of virus.
And some year ago Danes complained IKEA named carpets and runner after danish towns but never something "better".
I didn’t even know the name for the longest time. It’s only when I wanted to buy some extensions that I realized the cult status of that model, and that’s not (just) because of the name. It’s a truly great design and a shame that it was discontinued many years ago.
Is also a Swedish word, though slang, the imperative form of paxa which basically means the same as "dibs!" If I know my english colloquialisms correctly.
Fun Dutch observation:
IKEA’s ANTILOP high chair sounds like “anti lopen” in Dutch.
“lopen” = “to walk”
So the name can be interpreted as “anti walking” or “prevents your baby from walking away.”
I know it’s actually named after the animal (antelope), but the accidental Dutch wordplay is perfect for a baby chair.
Why should we treat a minor wiki page and some dude's personal site (who disagree with each other on totals) as authoritative proof Ikea is wrong about it's own catalog? Especially when it's not hard to find 1st/3rd party sources claiming an order of magnitude more products. Keep in mind, some things will also fall off the catalog over time.
I’m going to guess that a good chunk of products are named but never released. I’d love to know what products IKEA develops but decides to not release.
Amazing. A post asks a question in the title that I actually want answered, and then goes on to answer that question clearly and succinctly. Maybe the best corporate content I've seen this year.
But how can I find the answer to the question without reading punchy headers followed by paragraphs like
> How We Leverage Naming
> Our Naming Strategy, Explained
> Why Swedish Is Important
> The Bottom Line
And unforgettable aphorisms like
> It isn't just a name—it is the output of a scalable, globally coordinated, linguistically validated, Swedish-inspired naming framework designed to optimize brand consistency
to let me know? I'm completely lost on this page and can't find the answer without these.
Looks like some of these place names have been overpowered in search results by their named-for sofa counterparts! When searching Finnala, Sweden, I essentially only get search results for the sofa, and even the Google AI overview, while admitting it's a locality in Sweden, shows me a picture of the sofa!
The product names have made me chuckle quite a few times in the past. Such an easy way to make your products more likeable.
Also, maybe semi-relevant: I made a small guessing game about the IKEA product catalogue in case someone wants to be lightly entertainment for two minutes [1].
This is so random. I had just pulled this exact page up this morning to settle a debate with coworkers over whether the product names were real Swedish words or not. I thought they were all made up!
Was very surprised to find things like “bookshelves are all men’s names”, “all names must have ä, å, or ö”, etc.
Complete coincidence that this is #2 today. Had to check that ’NaOH’ wasn’t one of my coworkers
Those are the letters we have that are distinct from English. Not exotic to us, but yeah, "weird letters" is probably considered part of the international brand now.
By the way, we consider them unique letters, not A and O with diacritics. The Swedish alphabet goes …XYZÅÄÖ.
Oh, and I just learned that we only officially added W in 2006. Before that, it was considered a variant of V. We still pronounce them the same, which is why many swedes will mix them up when speaking English. Mostly in the W->V direction, but I've heard the opposite happen too.
I lived in Sweden in the late nineties. The local phone book had my Dutch name sorted under the V & W section because it has the word 'van' (means of in English) in it. In the Netherlands my name would be in the G section (van Gurp) because otherwise most of the phone book would have to be sorted under the V, which would defeat the purpose of sorting.
Just to make things worse, the Scandinavian languages use different versions of what have historically been the same letters, and collate them differently. E.g. Norwegian has æ (Ä), ø (Ö), å, collated in that order. Technically the Swedish variants are not part of the Norwegian alphabet, but they're typically collated with their modern Norwegian equivalents.
At least in Norwegian, ae, oe, and aa is also traditionally collated as if they were using these letters, so a word starting "aa" comes at the end of the alphabet, after z, oe and ae....
Not sure why, but when I see certain diacritics with latin alphabet, my brain tries to place the language somewhere in Europe. I don't know if I can call that an exotic feeling but it certainly feels foreign.
Scandinavia and the Nordics are quite fancy and refined for Americans. Lagom, hygge, fika, the minimalism, the enlightened equality and solidarity, good education, little crime, highest happiness ratings, even prisons are like hotels, etc makes it a kind of imagined lifestyle that's cozy and thoughtful and so on.
I guess it helps with emphasizing their Swedish identity, which is one of their goals with naming. Doesn't gel too well with "feels good to say" for a non-native speaker, but I see their point.
Yeah, given they sell to every continent, I find it utterly impossible they truly tested this with each of the dozens to hundreds of languages their customers speak.
Most likely. In the early 90s there was a knock-off of Ikea called Stør which used the ø for exoticism. I had assumed that it was a Danish company, but apparently, not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STØR (The store where I bought some of my first furniture from—off the 60 in City of Industry—was quite possibly the original location).
Swedish does naturally use a lot of letters with umlauts (e.g. a common plural suffix -är), so a noun with a special letter is usually not hard to come by, and looks more Swedish (than, say, Dutch or English, which are sort of cousin languages).
If you ever find yourself in southern Sweden (or Copenhagen and fancy a train ride across a cool bridge) the IKEA museum at Älmhult is well worth a visit: https://ikeamuseum.com/en/
I was there three days ago, can comfirm. And if you want to stay overnight, you _of course_ sleep in the neighbouring IKEA Hotel! And if you check-in to the hotel first, you‘ll get a voucher for free entrance to the museum. Did I mention that an absolutely excellent breakfast is included in the very reasonable room rate?
And in case you visit the museum in the near future, they currently have a special (temporary) exhibition about IKEA's founder, Ingvar Kamprad, who was a very creative but also exceptionally socially and environmentally responsible entrepreneur. Nice contrast to today's appalling tech billionaires.
I love how the chose Verde, which means value, for their long time retired kitchen furniture. They were so good that they still sell above their original retail prices now.
> Every possible product name is carefully checked to avoid undesirable meanings in other languages, political or religious affiliations and fit into our global profile.
> Ingvar Kamprad, founder of IKEA, had a hard time remembering numbers and numbers
And also numbers I assume. Does it mean something like “endless stream of numbers”?
I’m very surprised that they have 2000-3000 new products every year. Checking every name against every language of countries they operate in to avoid “bad” names must be a pain.
The Swedish version of the page just says "siffror" (literally "digits", but colloquially "numbers") once.
I'm not aware of any relevant Swedish expression that would repeat the same word like that. Maybe something like "siffror och tal", where both words could be translated as "numbers" by someone not paying attention to the resulting sentence. :)
The thing is that recent products are crappy. I got so many decades old secondhand things. They looked like regular old furniture and it was fine. Then I continued buying same things, but new. While the old furniture didn’t change at all the new pieces became yellow/brown after couple tears. We don’t smoke!!! It was a nightmare and I don’t buy IKEA products anymore.
Sometimes it works and name are weird, nice and fun.
But sometimes, quite a lot, I think that it is counter productive because the name is hard to remember, spell or say if local language.
So in the end, hard to say to a seller or type on the part screen the name of what you want. Most of the time you will not be able to remember what was the name of the thing and have to look around and find by categories to find again what you are looking for. And forgot the name already 3 days after.
And actually i was multiple time annoyed by that.
For example, look at the baby changing table name: ÄLSKVÄRD.
Also, hard to remember/pronounce name make it that often you are lost and confused between multiple names that doesn't make any sense to you like HFEREZR versus HORCRUX.
One case that frustrated me a lot is: good luck finding which white cabinet door you need to buy between VEDDINGE and VALLSTENA that are 99,9% the same, and have the same description on ikea website and shops...
In the warehouse you are looking for it, you look for the thing starting with the V, like VA...VII... something, and you find VEDDINGE. Was it this one i needed to be or another name similar?
I think your actual issue is that spelling and pronunciation are too inconsistent in your native language. With a more consistent language, it's pretty easy to remember foreign words and names using the pronunciation in your native language, assuming that the letters are mostly the same. You don't need to understand the word or know the correct pronunciation (though both obviously help).
If I remember correctly, they had a desk named "JERKER" in early 2000s.
For some reason unknown to either of us it really pisses off my wife when I refer to our IKEA furniture by the Swedish names. I think it stems from a deep seated disdain she has for flat pack furniture.
Me: where’s the thing?
Wife: in the white cupboard
Me: which white cupboard? There are 6
Wife: the white cupboard opposite the piano
Me: the Brimnes?
Wife: >.<
https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/cat/brimnes-series-700496/
Definately more fun would be the Polish version. How many people can pronounce the BYDGOSZCZ sofa, the PRZEMYSŁAW bookcase and the PSZCZOŁA soft toy?
This may not even be that far off from reality, looking at the sort of names rando brands on Amazon often have...
Which makes it hilarious when she's annoyed at the boy.
But for those in the US, wouldn't it all be a bit familiar? Whenever I watch a movie set in my home country with home accents and locations, it always feels a bit too familiar and it can cheapen the feel a bit.
I was watching Monk recently, and it feels kinda neat seeing a show shot in San Francisco because I used to live there. I wouldn't say it feels "cheap" though.
MAUL HALTEN!
So that wouldn't be a problem if Polish names would be provided with audio examples.
By the way, the communistic period here was full of products using regular words, name of places or people’s names. We had Wisła, Bieszczady wall units. First Polish color TV was Jowisz (Jupiter); first TV ever my mother had was called Szafir (Saphire). Then Szarotka (elderweis) or Sylwia radios from 50s and 60s respectively. A clone of IBM PC with Intel 8086 (or with Russian clone) from 1986 was called Mazovia - Mazowsze which is a historical region of Poland, same name was also used for DOS encoding for that machine.
I mean.. we have the Windsor Chair (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windsor_chair) and the Welsh Dresser (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_dresser) and those both slightly predate ikea so it's not a new thing.
E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs
(The dialogue goes, "Somewhere deep inside Ikea HQ: How shall we name the lamp?" "GNVÖERK.")
I think "being as widely-understandable pun as possible" is definitely one of their naming priorities.
https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/vuku-wardrobe-white-80331973/
Need an end table that is lacking?
https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/lack-side-table-white-30449908/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T2oje4cYxw
End table? That’s a server rack: https://wiki.eth0.nl/index.php/List_of_IkeaRacks
If that's true, I wonder how many years it will take to use up the remaining unused Swedish words.
I find this surprisingly high; I guess it’s _products_ and not _names_, meaning that five colors of the same product count as five new products but only one name.
I love the JERKER desk that I bought 26 years ago, so I assume this rule must be younger than that.
I heard a guy nearby telling the person with him "must be for the interns".
Took me several seconds to get it.
The same way "Brown" is common surname in English but mostly makes you think of the color first
"Malm" is a a noun with several meanings, most notably "metal ore", but also some (more archaic) meanings like "area with sandy soil" or "city outskirts".
The fact that "Malm" also happens to be a surname is secondary; Swedish has a lot of surnames that are simply ordinary nouns or adjectives. A completely literal "No surnames, ever" rule would probably be quite a bit too restrictive. I suspect that the actual internal rule is "No names that are primarily (or solely) surnames", or something to that effect.
Girl with the dragon tattoo was released in 2005
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_Pajero
I guess at the time the name was funny too but I had forgotten it.
PAX
https://www.ikea.com/de/en/cat/pax-system-19086/
It reminds some system - they didn’t allow “other” category for sorting features, but someone came with “999” :)
It's more likely that the whole product catalog contains 2-3k products. [1][2][3] So no, you don't.
[1] https://www.ikea.com/us/en/cat/products-products [2] https://lar5.com/ikea (~ 2200) [3] https://namingschemes.com/Ikea_Product_Names (~ 1300)
Why should we treat a minor wiki page and some dude's personal site (who disagree with each other on totals) as authoritative proof Ikea is wrong about it's own catalog? Especially when it's not hard to find 1st/3rd party sources claiming an order of magnitude more products. Keep in mind, some things will also fall off the catalog over time.
https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/nattbad-bluetooth-speaker-yello...
> How We Leverage Naming
> Our Naming Strategy, Explained
> Why Swedish Is Important
> The Bottom Line
And unforgettable aphorisms like
> It isn't just a name—it is the output of a scalable, globally coordinated, linguistically validated, Swedish-inspired naming framework designed to optimize brand consistency
to let me know? I'm completely lost on this page and can't find the answer without these.
The names just hit different.
https://about.iceland.co.uk/our-story/the-dark-ages/beware-m...
I’m bookmarking it for sharing
Submit it to Hacker News as its own post before I do.
Seriously.
You have one hour.
Looks like some of these place names have been overpowered in search results by their named-for sofa counterparts! When searching Finnala, Sweden, I essentially only get search results for the sofa, and even the Google AI overview, while admitting it's a locality in Sweden, shows me a picture of the sofa!
Also, maybe semi-relevant: I made a small guessing game about the IKEA product catalogue in case someone wants to be lightly entertainment for two minutes [1].
[1] https://deriese.net/ikeaguesser.html?s=hn
Was very surprised to find things like “bookshelves are all men’s names”, “all names must have ä, å, or ö”, etc.
Complete coincidence that this is #2 today. Had to check that ’NaOH’ wasn’t one of my coworkers
https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/p/fraeck-mirror-stainless-steel-3...
Yes, but why prefer these letters?
I don’t know Swedish. Is it because these diacritics make the names seem more exotic?
By the way, we consider them unique letters, not A and O with diacritics. The Swedish alphabet goes …XYZÅÄÖ.
Oh, and I just learned that we only officially added W in 2006. Before that, it was considered a variant of V. We still pronounce them the same, which is why many swedes will mix them up when speaking English. Mostly in the W->V direction, but I've heard the opposite happen too.
IKEA sold that too: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/306072403869
In Hungarian it's A, Á, B, C, Cs, D, Dz, Dzs, E, É, F... So Cu--- comes before Cs---
At least in Norwegian, ae, oe, and aa is also traditionally collated as if they were using these letters, so a word starting "aa" comes at the end of the alphabet, after z, oe and ae....
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71OSnDl45vL.jpg
A B C Č D Ď E F G H Ch I J…
• „če“ goes after both „ca“ and „ci“, but „ác“ goes between „ab“ and „ad“
• „cha“ goes after „da“ and „ha“
We have one called jysk... They're doing alright.
of course. Haagen Dazs, Motorhead, etc have known it loooong ago
Also, the A is short for Agunnaryd, the founder's hometown. (IK is his initials, Ingvar Kamprad, and E is for Elmtaryd, his family farm.)
A møøse once bit my sister...
Suck on that, AI Slop Detector!
(Confession and question for dang: I actually used an LLM to generate that unicode composite to copy and paste —̈ is that against HN guidelines?)
I always thought it's just a natural consequence of using Swedish language, turns out it's on purpose!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4si8w8WMFc
(Rob Paravonian - Particle Board) - of Dr. Demento, etc., fame.
https://www.ikeahotell.com/en/about-us/
https://www.fastcompany.com/91529069/what-its-like-to-stay-i...
British lad giving a review/tour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trcUc9ILYqI
Any speakers of either language able to confirm or deny?
I'm 100% för this.
Hey Donna [1]...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T2oje4cYxw
And also numbers I assume. Does it mean something like “endless stream of numbers”?
I’m very surprised that they have 2000-3000 new products every year. Checking every name against every language of countries they operate in to avoid “bad” names must be a pain.
I'm not aware of any relevant Swedish expression that would repeat the same word like that. Maybe something like "siffror och tal", where both words could be translated as "numbers" by someone not paying attention to the resulting sentence. :)
I’ve seen “LILCHYT” and “MYSHART” on the road recently.
Translation:
Ikea used to make somewhat reasonable and affordable products, that, in total were much higher quality than their price point suggested.
Now they are just cheap, on almost every metric.
So in the end, hard to say to a seller or type on the part screen the name of what you want. Most of the time you will not be able to remember what was the name of the thing and have to look around and find by categories to find again what you are looking for. And forgot the name already 3 days after. And actually i was multiple time annoyed by that. For example, look at the baby changing table name: ÄLSKVÄRD.
Also, hard to remember/pronounce name make it that often you are lost and confused between multiple names that doesn't make any sense to you like HFEREZR versus HORCRUX.
One case that frustrated me a lot is: good luck finding which white cabinet door you need to buy between VEDDINGE and VALLSTENA that are 99,9% the same, and have the same description on ikea website and shops... In the warehouse you are looking for it, you look for the thing starting with the V, like VA...VII... something, and you find VEDDINGE. Was it this one i needed to be or another name similar?
That's sexist. Saying women don't read books? /s