50 Common Words That Are Used As Brand Names

LINOLEUM

The floor covering we know as linoleum or lino was the first branded product to succumb to genericide. The word, which was coined by English inventor Frederick Walton in 1864, lost its trademark way back in 1878 following a legal challenge.

 

KEROSENE

Canadian physician and geologist Abraham Gesner developed a combustible hydrocarbon liquid in the late 1840s and trademarked the substance as Kerosene in 1854. The trademark held for several decades until it became genericized in many countries, including the US, Canada and Australia.

 

ESCALATOR

Otis Elevator Company employee Charles Seeberger invented the escalator and patented the innovation in 1900. Otis controlled the trademark until 1950 when a US court deemed the word had become the generic term for a moving staircase, and ‘escalator’ passed into the public domain.

 

ASPIRIN

Another early victim of genericide, Aspirin was a registered trademark owned by German pharmaceutical company Bayer until 1919 when it was revoked in several countries including the US, the UK and France, as part of Germany’s World War I reparations.

 

HEROIN

The infamous drug heroin is another one of Bayer’s trademarked brands that was voided in a number of nations by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Though universally known as heroin, the correct generic term for the narcotic is diamorphine.

 

BUBBLE WRAP

Bubble Wrap was invented in 1957 by New Jersey engineers Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes, who fused two shower curtains together to make the protective material. The pair’s Sealed Air Corporation trademarked the creation in 1960 and the brand name is still owned by the company.

 

JET SKI

Jet Ski is a brand name owned by Japanese firm Kawasaki, which trademarked the proper noun back in 1972. The correct generic term for the recreational vehicle is a personal water craft (or PWC).

 

FIBREGLASS/FIBERGLASS

The versatile fiber-reinforced resin material was trademarked in 1938 as ‘Fiberglas’ by the Owens Corning company, and while an extra ‘s’ has been added in its generic usage, the single ‘s’ trademark is, to this day, the intellectual property of the firm.

 

HULA HOOP

In 1958, US toy company Wham-O introduced the Hula Hoop. The tubed plastic rings, which were inspired by Australian bamboo exercise rings, fast became a fad and though the name has become generic, the Hula Hoop trademark is owned by Wham-O and ultimately its parent company InterSport Corp.

 

FRISBEE

Wham-O also snapped up the trademark for the Frisbee in 1957, a year before the launch of the Hula Hoop, but the gliding plastic disc didn’t become huge until the early 1960s. Despite the ubiquity of the Frisbee and various legal challenges over the years, Wham-O has managed to hold on to the trademark.