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Origin of the Name Hadoop

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SeriesBig data and Hadooppart 6 of 9
  1. Data! How it is important in this Digital Universe
  2. Data Storage and Analysis Problems Faced in Digital Universe
  3. Why MapReduce is needed instead of traditional Databases?
  4. How MapReduce is different from Volunteer Computing (SETI@home, Folding@home, GIMPS)?
  5. How MapReduce is different from Grid Computing and High Performance Computing?
  6. Origin of the Name Hadoop
  7. History of Hadoop
  8. Structured Data
  9. Unstructured Data

Origin of the Name Hadoop is not from an acronym and the name Hadoop doesn’t have any specific meaning too. It’s just a made up name! Hadoop Project’s creator, Doug Cutting, explains how the name came in to existing —

“The name my kid gave a stuffed yellow elephant. Short, relatively easy to spell and pronounce, meaningless, and not used elsewhere. Those are my naming criteria. Kids are good at generating such. Googol is a kid’s term.”

Hence it is confirmed that Hadoop is not having any acronym(Full Form) and it doesn’t have any meaning. In an interview with CNBC, Cutting responded to a question why a non-related meaningless name —

“The rules of names for software is they’re meaningless because sometimes the use of a particular piece of software drifts, and if your name is too closely associated with that, it could end up being wrong over time.”

![origin of the name hadoop 1](./images/origin-of-the-name-hadoop-1.png) ![origin of the name hadoop 2](./images/origin-of-the-name-hadoop-2.png)

Sub projects and “contrib” modules in Hadoop also tend to have names that are unrelated to their function, often with an elephant or other animal theme(Pig and Hive for examples). That’s the brief story of Origin of the Name Hadoop. Happy Learning! Happy Exploring!

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