What Does LEGO Stand For? The Meaning and History of LEGO

LEGO is a shortened form of the Danish phrase "leg godt". "Leg" means play and "godt" means well, so the name means "play well". Take the first two letters of each word — LEg GOdt — and you get LEGO.

The LEGO Group still describes the name this way: "It's our name and it's our ideal." The idea was that the company's toys should give children good, quality play. That was a deliberate choice of quality over cheap mass production, made well before LEGO made a single plastic brick.

In Latin, "lego" is a real verb, usually translated as "I gather", "I collect" or "I assemble". That sounds like a perfect description of building with bricks, and it's often repeated as the "real" meaning of LEGO.

It isn't. LEGO's official history says the Latin meaning was noticed only much later. When the name was chosen in the mid-1930s, the company made wooden toys, not construction bricks, so the match is a coincidence. LEGO itself calls it "a serendipitous twist".

LEGO has no special meaning in Dutch. The name comes from Danish, not Dutch.

The mix-up is understandable: Danish (spoken in Denmark) and Dutch (spoken in the Netherlands and Belgium) sound alike in English and are both Germanic languages. But the words behind the name, "leg godt", are Danish, and the company has always been based in Billund, Denmark.

There's no widely recognized slang meaning of "LEGO" that replaces the brand meaning. In everyday speech it's simply used for the bricks or the toy — and sometimes for anything modular, as in "it fits together like LEGO".

One usage question comes up a lot: is it "LEGOs" or "LEGO"? In the US people often say "Legos". The LEGO Group has long asked people to treat LEGO as a brand name used as an adjective — "LEGO bricks", "LEGO sets" — rather than as a plural noun. Both are understood, but "LEGO bricks" is the company's preferred form.

Ole Kirk Kristiansen was a master carpenter in Billund, a small town in Denmark. His business was called Billund Maskinsnedkeri (Billund Woodworking Shop). In 1932, during the Great Depression, he started making wooden toys and small household items to keep the business going.

The toys sold well with local families. In late 1935 he decided to concentrate on toys, and the new direction called for a new name. According to LEGO's history, he held a naming competition among his employees, with a bottle of his homemade wine as the prize. The winner was Kristiansen himself, who combined "leg godt" into LEGO.

He nearly chose something else. LEGO says he also considered "LEGIO", inspired by the idea of long rows — legions — of toys, before settling on the name that put the emphasis on good play. The LEGO name was first used officially in January 1936.

The LEGO Group dates its founding to 1932, when Ole Kirk Kristiansen began making toys in Billund. The LEGO name came four years later, in 1936. The company has passed from generation to generation within the Kirk Kristiansen family ever since.

The founder's name is spelled two ways. LEGO's official history uses Kristiansen. Older and English-language sources often write Christiansen, and his son Godtfred used the "Christiansen" spelling. Both refer to the same family.

"First LEGO set" can mean a few different milestones, so it helps to separate them.

First LEGO toys (1932): the company's earliest products were wooden toys such as animals, cars and yo-yos, made before the LEGO name existed. They weren't building sets.

First plastic bricks (1949): Automatic Binding Bricks were LEGO's first plastic building bricks. LEGO says the English name was chosen in honor of the Allied forces who liberated Europe in 1945. They were inspired by an earlier British design, the Kiddicraft Self-Locking Building Brick. They looked similar to today's bricks but were hollow underneath and didn't hold together firmly.

First LEGO system (1955): the LEGO System in Play launched with the Town Plan, a set built around a town layout, alongside more than 20 other sets. This is usually what people mean by the first real LEGO set, because it treated the bricks as one connected building system.

Modern brick (1958): the brick design used today was patented on January 28, 1958. LEGO notes that the famous patent covers the tubes inside the brick, which grip the studs of the brick below and give modern LEGO its clutch power. Bricks made in 1958 still fit bricks made today.

There wasn't one breakthrough year. LEGO's popularity built up over decades as the system grew.

The LEGO Group is privately held — it isn't listed on a stock exchange, so you can't buy LEGO shares. It's still owned by the family that founded it in 1932.

According to LEGO, the LEGO Group is owned by LEGO Holding, which is owned by:

• KIRKBI A/S, the Kirk Kristiansen family's holding company — 75% • The LEGO Foundation — 25%

The LEGO Foundation is a Danish corporate foundation that uses its share of the company's profits to fund projects supporting children's learning through play.

Owning the company is different from running it. The LEGO Group is managed day to day by an executive leadership team and a board of directors, while the family owns it through KIRKBI. The company has been led by four generations of the family: Ole Kirk Kristiansen, his son Godtfred Kirk Christiansen, his grandson Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, and his great-grandson Thomas Kirk Kristiansen, who represents the family as an owner today.

LEGO is one of the few global toy companies still owned by its founding family. Four generations have shaped it.

That 1953 change — molding the LEGO name into every brick — is still useful today. Genuine LEGO bricks have the word LEGO on top of each stud, and most parts have a mold or part number stamped inside or on the underside. Clone bricks usually have blank studs or a different logo.

If you have a loose brick and want to know what it is, check the studs for the LEGO logo, then look for the stamped Design ID, or photograph it with BrickFinder's piece identifier.