Sony

In late 1945, after World War II, Masaru Ibuka started a radio repair shop in a bombed-damaged department store building in Nihonbashi of Tokyo.

The next year, he was joined by his colleague Akio Morita and they founded a company called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo which translates in English to Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation. The company built Japan's first tape recorder called the Type-G.

When Tokyo Tsushin was looking for a romanised name to use to market themselves, they strongly considered using their initials, TTK. But Japanese railway company Tokyo Kyuko was also known as TKK.

The company occasionally used the acronym 'Totsuko' in Japan, but during his visit to the United States, Morita discovered that Americans had trouble pronouncing that name.

Finally they settled for 'Sony' - a mix of two words - the Latin word Sonus which is the root of 'sonic' and 'sound' and the other was 'sonny', a familiar term used in 1950s America to call a boy.

At that time it was extremely unusual for a Japanese company to use Roman letters instead of kanji to spell its name and the move was not without opposition.