In the summer of 1994, Jeff Bezos was driving cross-country from New York to Seattle, dictating a business plan into a recorder while his then-wife MacKenzie drove. He had just quit his job at the hedge fund D.E. Shaw to start an online bookstore. He needed a name.
His first choice was Cadabra — short for "abracadabra," signaling magic, transformation, something appearing from nothing. He liked the sound of it. He registered the company as Cadabra Inc. in the state of Washington.
Then he called his lawyer.
The Search for a New Name
Bezos wanted a name that started with the letter A — partly because directories and lists were often sorted alphabetically, and appearing near the top had real commercial value in the pre-search era. He reportedly went through a dictionary and made lists of words beginning with A.
He landed on Amazon — the world's largest river by volume, running through the world's largest rainforest. The scale resonated. Bezos wanted to build the world's largest bookstore. The river's size was the metaphor he was looking for.
The Name Almost Didn't Stick Either
Early Amazon employees reportedly had mixed feelings about the name. Some thought "Amazon" sounded exotic but difficult to spell. Others worried about the association with the Amazon rainforest — would people think it was an environmental company?
Bezos was unmoved. He wanted scale and he wanted it to start with A. Amazon it was.
The Trademark Picture
Amazon's trademark portfolio today is one of the most extensive in the world — covering everything from the word mark "Amazon" to the distinctive smile logo (the curved arrow running from A to Z, suggesting the company sells everything from A to Z). The USPTO trademark database shows hundreds of Amazon.com Inc. registrations across dozens of Nice Classification classes.
The core "Amazon" word mark covers Class 35 (retail services), Class 38 (telecommunications), Class 42 (technology services), and many others. The A-to-Z smile, filed separately, is protected as a design mark.
What "Relentless" Tells You
The fact that Bezos registered relentless.com in 1994 and still owns it three decades later says something about the man and the company. "Relentless" was a serious contender for the company name. It didn't make it past Bezos's own instincts — it was too on the nose, too aggressive-sounding for a bookstore.
Amazon, by contrast, projected size and ambition without menace. It was geographic rather than behavioral. It described aspiration rather than method.
The irony is that "relentless" turned out to be a more accurate description of the company than "Amazon" ever was. The river is passive. The company is not.
The Lesson
A name that sounds like "cadaver" will not sell books. This seems obvious in retrospect. But the lesson isn't just phonetic — it's about what happens when brand names are tested against real human ears rather than a founder's enthusiasm. Bezos needed an outside listener to hear what he couldn't hear himself.
The best brand naming processes include this step deliberately: say the name out loud to someone who has never seen it written, and listen to what they hear back. Bezos learned it accidentally from a phone call with his lawyer.