The hidden meaning behind the names of tech giants: what does Samsung mean?

Technology is becoming more and more intricately knit inside the fabric of our daily lives, as the number of gadgets we own seems to just grow larger and larger every year - bigger and bigger TVs, larger and more powerful smartphones, more tablets, and now new smartwatches are all taking a place in the household (and sometimes on our own body), and who knows what’s going to come next. One of the most successful companies in the electronics arena, Samsung, is a name you see more and more on not just TVs, but phones and tablets. However, did you know that the name Samsung has an actual meaning behind it? It's obscured because of the company's foreign origins, but it's there.

First, we ought to mention that Samsung is a company based in Seoul, South Korea, and as such, its name is purely Korean. Samsung is actually a word made of two parts - Sam and Sung, and each of them has a meaning. Sam stands for ‘three’ and Sung means ‘stars’, so combined together Samsung literally translates as ‘three stars’ or ‘tristar’. This Korean symbol (‘hanja’) stands to signify something that Samsung is “big, numerous, and powerful” (translated from the ‘sam’ hanja), and ‘eternal’ (as in the ‘sung’ hanja). Summing it all up, we have something big, powerful, and eternal embedded right in Samsung’s DNA, its brand name.

Curiously enough, those same three stars were actually reflected in the company’s logo from its earliest days in the 30s, when Samsung was just starting off as the business of a few families of landowners. Now, Samsung employs over 236,000 people across 79 countries in the world (apart from Korea), and it’s one of the world’s 10 most valuable brands. Staggering evolution, isn’t it?