The original name of the programming language now known as Java was Oak.
James Gosling began the project at Sun Microsystems in 1991 as part of the Green Project. The team intended to create software for a range of consumer and embedded devices, so the language needed to be portable across different processors. Gosling named it Oak after an oak tree outside his office.
The name Oak had to be changed because it was already a trademark used by another company. The team selected Java, a term associated with coffee, before the language was publicly announced in 1995. The coffee connection later became part of Java’s visual branding.
Java’s name is sometimes confused with JavaScript because both names contain “Java.” JavaScript was created by Brendan Eich at Netscape and was originally called Mocha. The two languages have different histories, syntax details, execution environments, and typical uses.