businesswhatisthemostfamousnameintheworl
Business:What is the most famous name in the world?
What is the most famous name in the world?
All the dictionaries I pick up tell me that “Name” is a word or combination of words or term by which a person or thing is regularly known or called. By this definition, my methodology to look for the most famous name in the word is to:
first screen out words that do not fall into this definition,
search for words that fall into this definition, and
compare and test the name that best suit the title.
Screening process
Being a Christian, the first name that comes into my mind is naturally God. I then compare God and the definition but only to find out that God is neither a person (though God has personality) nor a thing. Also, the word God itself is not really a name, rather the word to describe what God is. So the word God is out.
How about Elohim, Yaweh or Jesus? Well they are God’s names alright, but again God is not a person or thing. Jesus is both man and God but not man in the truest sense and thus does not fall in line with the definition.
Then I started to think of China and India that have a combined population of 3 billions people. I think if I say China, at least 1.3 billions people will know the name. It should be considered as famous.
Again, I consulted with my Guru dictionary and they told me China is not a person or thing either. It should be considered as a nation or country instead.
I started to think of a more common name that would be able to fall into the definition of person or thing. I think of universal words like water, food, universe, earth, land air, planet that involves every human life on earth. Who on earth does not know the word “air” they breath all the time? So air should be the word.
But atlas, all these mother natures words, are not only not to be considered as things, they are also not names. Like the word God, they are description to the nature of things.
In search for names.
I ponder for names suggested by the title like Shakespeare or Muhammad Ali or may be McDonalds? Then I paused to tell myself, “no”, these are all western names and the most populated places are in Asia. May be Confucian is far better for at least we have 1.35 billions to make it a famous name.
Slowly, I came up with more than a hundred famous names ranging from person to things.
Compare and test
I went on to compare my list of names by asking myself “If I were to pronounce these names to a person in Asian, European or African countries, how many would know the name? I have to consider the pronunciation changes due to translation and others. My extensive traveling experiences through out the years give me the knacks to compare and reduce the list down quite significantly. Kentucky fried chicken may be famous in Australia, but no one in China or Japan or Thailand would know what on earth the name is? You simply have to say KFC. Mitsubishi may be quite well known, but Chinese all over the world would know the name by the writing character pronunciation of San-Ling more than Mitsubishi. So are many more Japanese product names like Mitsui, Sumitomo, etc.
And so my final list was down to about ten. They are:
Person - George Bush, Queen Elizabeth, Mao Tse-Tung,
Things like Coke, Pepsi, Nokia, Samsung, Google, Yahoo, and Toyota.
My final move was to do some testing to verify my judgment. I divided my sampling groups in three categories of age.
10-20 years old
The first and easiest group I researched upon is my own kid and their group of 20 or so friends.
20-40
I did some asking on the employees of company near by the house.
40-60
I simply called up some of my friends and tested them.
My results read like this:
For the junior, their most famous name in the whole world is Google. They know also Yahoo, Coke and Nokia, but Google is the most famous.
For the mature, the most famous name is Pepsi.
The senior is more interested in politic and George Bush tops the chart of my survey.
My conclusion is the younger the person, the more he tends to associate himself with the name of thing. The older you grow; the more you shift your interest to person’s name. And with the world population is still somewhat tilted towards a triangle shape or more young people to the bottom, I would vote that “Google” is the most famous name in the world.