Amazon’s original name was Cadabra before the company became Amazon.
Jeff Bezos founded the online bookseller in 1994 under the name Cadabra, a shortened form of “abracadabra.” The name was changed after a lawyer reportedly misheard it as “cadaver.” Bezos then selected Amazon, invoking the scale of the Amazon River and suggesting a business that could become very large.
The company initially operated as an online bookstore because books offered a huge selection and were relatively straightforward to catalogue and ship. Amazon opened its website to customers in July 1995 and later expanded far beyond books into retail, cloud computing, entertainment, devices, and advertising.
Cadabra is sometimes confused with Amazon’s later names and brands. Amazon.com is the retail website, while Amazon Web Services is its cloud division. The corporate name change happened before the company became publicly traded and long before its market capitalization reached the hundreds of billions of dollars.