Understand spoken language

Why is the website called Lingopolo?

Submitted by admin on 18 November 2012

The name Lingopolo comes from two parts, "lingo" and "polo".  

"Lingo" means a foreign language or local dialect, and of course Lingopolo is all about helping you to learn the foreign lingo or language.  

The "polo" part is mainly there just to give the word "Lingopolo" a nice sound, and to turn it from a nondescript name like "Lingo website" to a proper noun, "Lingopolo".  The word "poly" meaning "many or much", was in mind originally, but ultimately it was changed to "polo" for the nice sound of having "o"..."o"..."o" in the name. Some people have wondered whether it comes from the name of the great explorer Marco Polo. I don't remember thinking of him when I was choosing the name, but that's a nice connection.

One of the other considerations that I had was I wanted something fairly easy to pronounce. I think the word Lingopolo achieves that. I don't know whether that is the case in all languages. That time will tell.

The mixture of some relevant real words, and changing it a little is like the way the names "Skype" and "Google" are formed; these names contain bits which mean something (Skype contains "sky", the blue stuff above you, and the name Google is based on "googol", a large number) but then they get tweeked a bit and turned into a proper noun, which becomes the brand name.  Similarly Lingopolo is simply based on the word lingo, turned into a unique brand name by the addition of polo.

I suppose the name may have slightly different connotations depending on the language you start from. As one of my Thai teachers pointed out, the word "ling" in Thai is actually the word for monkey.

So now you know why it's Lingopolo.