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Google has come out with its own browser and called it Chrome so I thought I’d look into chrome as a word.

First of all I think many people know that Google as a company took its name in error, based a made-up name for a large number.

Edward Kasner was an American mathematician who once asked his nine year old nephew Milton Sirotta what he thought a really big number should be called. Milton said googol and that an even bigger number should be called googolplex.

So these are now the names of two numbers.

Googol is 1×10 100 (that’s 1 with 100 zeros after it)

(that’s 1 with 100 zeros after it) Googolplex is 1×10googol

The founders of Google Sergey Brin and Larry Page knew the internet was big and so chose googol for their name; except, like me, they weren’t perfect spellers.

There the similarity ends.

Anyway, on to chrome.

Like Google itself the origins of chrome touch on a rags-to-riches story.

I’m not sure why Google named its new browser Chrome but here are some thoughts.

Google has been pretty supportive of the browser Firefox and buried within any Firefox installation there is a folder called chrome and in that folder there is a file called userchrome. Within the userchrome file it says

“This file can be used to customize the look of Mozilla’s user interface.”

Wired Magazine says chrome is

“the term used to describe the frame, toolbars, and menus bordering a browser window”

and a Wikipedia article on Graphical User Interface says that

“the visible…features of an application are sometimes referred to as chrome.”

So chrome denotes “the look” of things.

I find further support for this “look” meaning from Google themselves.

In one of the YouTube videos issued to promote the new browser project manager Brian Rakowski says:

“From top to bottom we designed the interface to make sure that it was as efficient and as clean as possible. We argued over every single pixel in the chrome of Chrome to make sure there was nothing wasted.”

So from that “chrome of Chrome” you might expect that Google wants Chrome to be the new look of the internet.

But Google doesn’t do something for nothing and there is a slang meaning to chrome that might apply too.

To most people chrome denotes a shiny mirror-like finish on metal. One metal object in particular gave the word chrome a slang meaning; that object is a handgun.

I can’t find a date for a first citation where chrome meant “gun” but I see it in many Urbandictionary entries as well as in Tony Thorne’s Dictionary of Contemporary Slang.

Software applications that become really popular are called killer apps so perhaps chrome as “gun” fits there with Google’s hopes for it.

But it’s the logo that Google has chosen for Chrome that points to chrome’s etymology.

It’s Google’s corporate blue, red, yellow and green. There isn’t a metallic look to it at all; it’s more a plastic look.

In 1797 a French chemist by the name of Louis-Nicolas Vauquelin isolated chromium as an element. He noticed that compounds that contained chromium had especially vibrant color and so he chose as the name for this new element the Greek word for “color” khroma.

Other chemists liked Latin better than Greek which is why we call the stuff chromium; it sounds more Latin.

Google is also offering the source code for its new browser for others to use.

By amazing coincidence the open-source project name is chromium.

So maybe Google thinks mixing its new browser with other elements of the web will give the internet more vivid color—figuratively speaking of course.

I said there was a rags to riches story in here somewhere.

Louis-Nicolas Vauquelin’s parents were French peasants but Louis-Nicolas was lucky enough to be apprenticed in what we’d now call a drug store or pharmacy. This highlighted his natural genius for chemistry and he went on to become one of the first professors to make lab work part of an education. Instead of just talking about how chemicals reacted with each other, he got them to actually mix the stuff up and see for themselves.

Today’s episode brought to you by Grammar Girl’s New York Times bestselling book. Look for the link at grammar.quickanddirtytips.com