Bluetooth Is Named After a Danish King's Nickname

According to the official Bluetooth website, King Harald is known for uniting Denmark and Norway in 958, and he got the nickname "Bluetooth" because one of his teeth was dead and had turned a dark blue-gray.

In the mid-1990s, Intel, Ericsson, and Nokia met to discuss a standard for technology that links different devices wirelessly over short distances. At that meeting, Jim Kardach of Intel proposed the name as a temporary code name. Just as the king united Scandinavia, he hoped this technology would unite the computer and mobile phone industries. The official website says it was meant to hold the place until the marketing team could come up with something really cool.

The candidates for the official name were RadioWire and PAN (Personal Area Networking), and PAN was the front-runner. But a search showed that tens of thousands of pages on the internet already used it. The trademark check on RadioWire could not be finished before launch.

Meanwhile, the name Bluetooth spread quickly through the industry until it could no longer be changed. In May 1998, five companies, Ericsson, IBM, Intel, Nokia, and Toshiba, publicly announced the Bluetooth SIG (a group that manages the technology standard). The announcement described it as a short-range wireless technology on the globally available 2.45GHz band that connects devices such as mobile phones and notebook computers without cables.

The Bluetooth logo is made by merging two runes, letters of an old Nordic alphabet. The two runes correspond to the initials of King Harald's name. It is the angular mark you may have seen on your phone's settings screen.

The name may look like an English abbreviation, but it does not stand for anything. The official website says so too. It was not named for blue radio waves either. Today the name has settled in as the word for technology that connects many kinds of devices, from earbuds to cars to keyboards.