Bluetooth Named After Viking King

The name for the ubiquitous wireless technology connecting our phones, headphones, and computers comes from a rather unlikely source: a 10th-century Scandinavian king. Harald "Bluetooth" Gormsson was a Viking king renowned for uniting the feuding tribes of Denmark and parts of Norway into a single kingdom. In the late 1990s, when engineers from Intel, Ericsson, and Nokia were developing a new standard to unite different short-range communication protocols, they needed a codename for the project. The analogy was perfect—one king uniting disparate peoples, one technology uniting disparate devices.

The name was suggested by Intel engineer Jim Kardach in 1997, who had recently been reading a historical novel about Vikings (Review) that featured the famous king. What was intended to be a temporary placeholder name caught on because the metaphor was so fitting. The name "Bluetooth" resonated so well with the project's goal of allowing devices from different manufacturers to seamlessly communicate with one another that it was adopted as the official trademark.

This tribute to the medieval monarch extends even to the famous logo. The symbol is not just an abstract design or a stylized "B." It is a bind rune, a composite symbol created by merging two ancient Norse runes from the Younger Futhark alphabet. The logo combines Hagall (ᚼ), which represents the initial 'H', and Bjarkan (ᛒ), which represents the initial 'B'. Together, they form the initials of Harald Bluetooth, forever embedding this piece of Viking history into our modern digital world.