The trash receptacle dumpster is named after its inventor, Tennessee businessman George Roby Dempster. His Dempster-Dumpster system, trademarked in 1936, distributed standardized trash containers that could be mechanically emptied into garbage trucks. As with many wildly successful brand name inventions, dumpster eventually became the generic word for a large trash container. Dumpster fire is from 2003, likely influenced by trash fire. I’m struck by the similarity of how Wordle, named after its 2021 inventor Josh Wardle, led to the suffix -le indicating a daily sharable web game.

I find looking through lists of genericized trademarks fascinating. Most recently you find words that “everyone knows” are trademarks, like google (1998) and epipen (1983). But not much further back are words where any alternatives sound awkward, like tupperware (1946), velcro (1955), and frisbee (1937). And before that, you find surprise after surprise that some ordinary-sounding words used to be specific products, such as cellophane (1912), tarmac (1902), and jacuzzi (1915).

See also spam (1937), q-tip (1930), and escalate (1944).