When Jeff Bezos launched his multi-billion dollar empire back in the 90s it had a different name, but he soon changed it after the original was misheard as something quite ghoulish.

Amazon is a massive retail empire which dominates the online shopping market, makes its own TV shows and is sending people into space in a giant rocket which looks like a... you know.

These days Bezos is launching his girlfriend into space (that's not a euphemism) and somehow overseeing Amazon shed a trillion dollars in value in the past year or two.

However, it all started back in 1994 when he quit his job at a Wall Street firm and set up his own business, but just a few months later he was changing it for a very specific reason.

Bezos picked Amazon as his new company name for a couple of reasons, first that it sounded 'exotic and different' and second that a name beginning with 'a' and having another 'a' in it would get them to the top of alphabetized lists.

It was very nearly a different name stuck on the side of this building. Credit: Sundry Photography / Alamy Stock Photo

It was certainly better than what started out as 'Earth's biggest book store' was originally called, and Bezos probably owes the guy who got him to change it a big favour.

When Bezos first launched the-company-not-yet-known-as-Amazon it was first called Cadabra, as in the chunk of the magic word 'Abracadabra', but he changed that after just a few months.

The reason for the big switcheroo away from the original name to Amazon occurred after a lawyer misheard the company name and thought it was called 'Cadaver', as in the word we use for a dead body.

Not wanting people to say his company's name and think of dead bodies, Bezos ultimately decided to get the name changed and the business grew from selling books online out of his garage into the global online shop we know today.

Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, former Cadabra boss Jeff Bezos. Credit: Simon Serdar / Alamy Stock Photo

There's probably another reason it's good for Amazon that they decided to move away from being called Cadabra, and that's because the Pokémon with basically the same name (just spelt with a 'K' instead of a 'C') ended up getting banned for years.

Granted, Kadabra's ban had more to do with the spoon it was holding and the psychic powers it used that attracted the wrath of Uri Geller, but it still seems like the name change was a big benefit for Amazon.

It's a good thing Bezos made all of that money or he might have struggled in recent years losing so much of it.