IKEA: linguistics, esthetics, engineering
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First, how to say the name.
I think that the "correct" pronunciation of IKEA is "ee-kay-uh", with emphasis on the "ee" sound, similar to the way a native Swedish speaker would say it, not "eye-kee-ah" or "ai-kee-uh" with stress on the second syllable, the way most Americans say it (all the Americans I know).
What does it mean?
IKEA is an acronym for Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd, the names of the founder and the places where he grew up.
In my lifetime, I've probably put together ten items of IKEA furniture, the most recent being their simplest, cheapest bed frame called Neiden. It was a tremendous challenge, taking me a total of two whole, taxing, exhausting days.
I didn't follow their advice that it requires two people to put Neiden together. That was a mistake.
Their drawings are in two dimensions, but require you to think and act in three dimensions.
In the entire booklet of instructions (about ten pages), I did not see a single word (all drawings), but I did twice see this symbol: ⓘ ("i" inside of a circle). I think it means "this drawing provides 'information' about what you're supposed to do with these parts". One of these ⓘs occurred in an expanded drawing that explained how to assemble the two parts of a wrench — the hard plastic handle and the metal Allen hex wrench (the one with only a single bend). Sounds simple, right? Wrong.
Assembling this wrench was one of the trickiest maneuvers (there were many tricky maneuvers) that had to be applied in putting the bed frame together. The relevant drawing showed where to insert the wrench into the handle, and it even had an arrow indicating which direction to push the wrench. But then I started to tremble, because embossed on the top surface of the black handle at one end was the numeral "4" and at the other end was the numeral "5". There was no explanation for what "4" and "5" meant. As I pushed this way and that, the wrench would not engage solidly with the handle. I began to swear (aver — not yet curse) that the numerals were printed backwards and at the wrong ends of the handle.
I was just beginning, yet already I was getting very, very frustrated by this three inch two-part device. As I twisted and turned those two small components, flipping them in different directions, suddenly the wrench clicked / locked in as solidly as if they were one piece made of two different materials.
How did I do it??? During all of my flipping and flopping, twisting and turning, it transpired that I twisted and turned, flipped and flopped the two parts at the same time.
Triumph!! Victory!!
Now I had a wrench firmly affixed to a handle.
And so it went for two days.
The above account of the trial of making the Allen hex wrench with handle serves as a prelude to this fugue about the making of a piece of furniture.
The Neiden bed frame came in a flat box that was about 6.5 ft. long, a foot or so wide, and four inches thick (those dimensions are all retrospective guesstimates). The box was heavy and tightly packed, so that it must have taken quite a bit of ingenuity to determine the order in which the pieces were placed. It was even somewhat difficult to extricate the individual pieces from their interlocking jigsaw-like assembly inside of the cardboard box.
As I pulled out the wooden parts of the bed frame, the aroma of perfectly, freshly sawn lumber from a Swedish forest filled my room. Ahh! Refreshing! Invigorating!
I laid out all of the parts on the floor in neat piles, familiarizing myself with which parts were supposed to go where.
The directions are mostly accurate, but occasionally they are impenetrable and rarely they are inaccurate. I'm told that there's a skit somewhere on the internet (maybe from SNL) that joshes people struggling to make sense of IKEA direction manuals.
All together, there were about ninety pieces big and small, mostly microscopically numbered to identify what goes where. There were four tiny screws — the smallest items in the box — that were neither numbered nor even pictured in the manual. That really worried me. What was I going to do with those four tiny numberless, pictureless screws?
I set the little screws aside, fearful that they might get lost as I shuffled all the other parts around, but in the end decided there was nothing I could do beside wait and see when I finished putting all the other parts together if there were four wee holes that remained unfilled.
Like their design, IKEA instructions are minimalist. Let us just say that you have to be good at intuiting and extrapolating to successfully put together a piece of IKEA furniture, plus you have to possess stamina and be good at filling in the gaps, and don't expect to complete the task "full fart".
Previous Language Log posts (see "Selected readings" below) have described and analyzed IKEA nomenclatural practice. Quaint, to say the least.
No matter what the ultimate shape of your new IKEA furniture, it's almost certain to come in a flat package, in accordance with a vow of Ingvar Kamprad to make it easy for you to transport home in your car. I live less than twenty miles from Plymouth Meeting, where the first IKEA store in America was established in 1985. (Eight years later, they moved a few miles down the road to a town with a name I love, Conshohocken (Unami for "pleasant valley"), where they constructed a gigantic store which also houses the US corporate headquarters of IKEA. Oft were the times when the IDEA brain taxing began with wrestling their flat (and sometimes long) package into or on your car and tying it down with twine.
People came to the IKEA store in Plymouth Meeting from as far away as New England, the Carolinas and Florida, and the Midwest.
When I lived in Sweden for a year, I quickly became familiar with the adage of their Scandinavian neighbors that the Swedes were "a nation of engineers". They bear that reputation out from the construction and quality of their thousands of cleanly crafted and elegantly designed household furnishings.
In Sweden, at least when I lived there, everything fit together neatly and clicked tightly in place. They were / are engineers par excellence.
Oh, but what about those four tiny screws left lingering on my rug? I searched high and low, backwards and forward all over my snugly joined Neiden. Finally I spied four teeny holes that had been drilled on the inside face of four rectangular wooden blocks that served as extra supports for the legs of the bed. As instructed by the enigmatic drawings in the inscrutable manual, I had attached the blocks to the legs with two each of the stubby, grooved dowels that came in a plastic bag. There they were, hanging from the legs of the bed, but they didn't seem very secure. In fact, they were kind of dangling from the legs, and I was afraid they would fall off when I moved the bed around in the slightest.
Trepidatiously, I screwed the itsy-bitsy screws into the teeny-weeny holes on the inside face of the legs hidden underneath the hard wooden slats that served as the "springs" beneath the mattress. Miraculously, the blocks no longer wobbled! I can sleep in peace on my new Neiden.
Selected readings
- "Ikea: Peppered Caca for the holidays" (10/27/14)
- "The same text but in Arabic" (8/22/20) — sign at an IKEA store
- "Anti-collision particle physics" (3/6/23)
- "All work and no play" (12/28/14)
- "Speculative semiotics of Northern European product names" (4/1/08)
- "Script quiz" (2/25/07)
Rodger C said,
March 8, 2025 @ 12:54 pm
If all Americans pronounce "Ikea" as an English word, then surely this is by definition the correct American pronunciation? Cf. "Aigner", "Keurig", etc.
Philip Taylor said,
March 8, 2025 @ 1:29 pm
Are you certain about the stress placement, Mark ? I have always understood that the Swedes stressed the second syllable, not the first. Cf.
J.M.G.N said,
March 8, 2025 @ 2:08 pm
According to the Longman Pronunciation Dict, it's primary pronunciation is /aɪ ˈkiːə/
Gunnar H said,
March 8, 2025 @ 2:25 pm
Philip is correct: In Swedish the stress falls on the second syllable.
S Frankel said,
March 8, 2025 @ 3:28 pm
Shortly after I returned from a year in Sweden (where my last name was "Fränkel," messing up their alphabetical order, since 'ä' is alphabetized 'z', between 'å' and 'ö'), IKEA starting advertising on tv in preparation for opening their first stores here in the US. I was surprised at their "eye-kee-ah" pronunciation, but for whatever reason it seems that's what the company chose.
Victor Mair said,
March 8, 2025 @ 3:41 pm
Pretend that you're seeing "IKEA" for the first time and had no idea how it should be pronounced.
I
K
E
A
Guess what? I just had an IDEA from that last sentence!
Coby said,
March 8, 2025 @ 3:58 pm
It seems to me that foreign companies, in their own advertising in the US, invariably use the American pronunciations of their products' names. Volkswagen uses the English, not the German sounds of V and W. Peugot was "POO-joe". Bacardí is stressed on the second syllable despite the acute accent. And so on.
katarina said,
March 8, 2025 @ 5:55 pm
Dear Professor,
Enjoyed your IKEA post tremendously. It's a delightful piece, and awesome how you remembered every step of the unpacking and assembling, down to the mysterious tiny screws which you had put aside and could have easily forgotten.
I have a new IKEA "day-bed", which I prefer to call my "davenport".
My daughter insisted on replacing my small pull-out sofa-bed with an IKEA "pull-out trundle twin-size daybed". It's big enough to sleep on, so I don't need to pull it out to king-size.
Congratulations on assembling your Neiden alone! My davenport was assembled by two young men from my family. They brought it over to my small apartment at 3 pm and starting unpacking it. I couldn't believe the huge number of pieces. I had thought IKEA furniture was simple. They puzzled and struggled over it until midnight. I begged them to go home and come back on the morrow. They refused but carried on till they completed the assembly at 3 am. All told 12 hours.
Sweet dreams on your new bed !
–k.–
julian said,
March 8, 2025 @ 7:14 pm
“IKEA is an acronym for Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd”
Thanks. Very useful information for impressing friends at dinner parties.
“Do you like our new Skörtingbård?”
“The skirtingboard?”
“The dining suite. That’s the name of this model.”
“Nice. Where did you get it?”
“From Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd.”
“????”
“It’s a boutique Swedish furniture dealer. Supporting the traditional crafts of Lappland and Norrland. Every piece lovingly carved by skilled artists whose forefathers perfected the craft while whittling away the long winters in their smoky hovels. All the fastenings made from genuine prehistoric mastodon horn recovered from the bog.”
“Looks a bit like the one my son-in-law got from IKEA.”
“Oh, IKEA! I wouldn’t go there!”
Mike Anderson said,
March 8, 2025 @ 10:46 pm
Po-TAY-to, pa-TAH-ta. I see ya, IKEA.
What a warehouse of cheap future junk an IKEA store is. Showroom rabbit hutches of crap that wouldn't survive a crosstown move. And I can get some pretty good lingonberry jam at the World Market downtown.
andreasj@gmail.com said,
March 9, 2025 @ 3:22 am
My IKEA bookshelves may be cheap, but they've survived a dozen crosstown moves this far.
Robert Coren said,
March 9, 2025 @ 9:17 am
I've never purchased anything from IKEA, but I've had to assemble things (furniture and stuff) whose instructions were entirely graphic (no words), and in general I hate it. I understand the idea behind it – they don't have to decide how many languages to print the instructions in (and sometimes the translations are so bad that they're borderline incomprehensible), but the drawings that are presumably supposed to be obvious in showing what you have to do are often far from obvious to this particular Brain of a Certain Age.
katarina said,
March 9, 2025 @ 10:26 am
Puhlee-eez! Don't call my davenport, vulgarly know as IKEA day-bed, cheap! It's not cheap! It's affordable, "affordable" as in "affordable housing". I don't think cheap things are sold any more, they've transmogrified into affordable things, just like my davenport has transmogrified from a day-bed. With cheap things gone, replaced by affordable things, the world is now a better place.
Philip Taylor said,
March 9, 2025 @ 10:28 am
I too possess a "Brain of a Certain Age", Robert (78 years, at the last count), and like you, I find text-free instructions totally useless. I have no doubt that the age of our brains is involved, but I am not convinced that it is necessarily a symptom of neurological aging — rather, I think, that you and I (and many others) were brought up in an era where (a) virtually everyone was literate, and (b) instructions were given in prose. Thus (I suspect) we have become totally dependent on the assumed existence of such prose, and flounder (or drown) when faced with instructions that are prose-free.
Philip Taylor said,
March 9, 2025 @ 10:32 am
If you don't think that "cheap things are sold any more", Katarina, may I recommend a trip to Poundland or any similar chain. Remember the motto of the Roman legions — S.P.Q.R. ("Small profits, quick returns") !
katarina said,
March 9, 2025 @ 11:36 am
@Philip Taylor
Philip,
Oh, I see there's a difference between British English and AmEngl. Here in the U.S. "affordable housing" is the govt.'s euphemism for "cheap housing". In the marketplace the word "affordable" is likewise a euphemism for "cheap", just like "senior" is a euphemism for "old".
katarina said,
March 9, 2025 @ 11:52 am
Philip,
Here in the US, courtesy– euphemism– is even extended to dogs. In the news, old dogs are called "senior dogs".
katarina said,
March 9, 2025 @ 12:59 pm
@Mike Anderson
Mike, bear in mind that "beauty lies in the eye of the beholder". "Crap" lies in the eye of the beholder.
Ergo, one man's "crap" may be another man's gold.
Thank you Mr. Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd for inventing the IKEA wonderland.
KevinM said,
March 9, 2025 @ 1:16 pm
Is there a term for the practice of making products less language-dependent for the international market? (Consider "action" movies, etc.)
ardj said,
March 9, 2025 @ 3:03 pm
Although even older (and undoubtedly sillier) than Phillip Taylor, I can ordinarily manage Ikea's instructionsm albeit unwillingly – what happened to 'rtfm!' ?
But I am conditioned: we moved five times in four years, each time between countries; and in two of them I had to set up the shelving and so forth for my wife's office, as well as the desks and computers for the first four employees (after that number, desk construction was the first task of new staff). Then there was our own 'umble abode …..
But I read the instructions for the Neiden, and I agree with Professor Mair that this bed is a bear.
Julian said,
March 9, 2025 @ 5:00 pm
IKEA works on the principle that all publicity is good publicity. It’s all about name recognition.
So when a lifestyle influencer writes yet another article moaning about IKEA’s impossible instructions, the IKEA marketing folk high-five each other: “People are talking about us!”
For IKEA a particularly juicy market segment is overconfident men of a certain age (OCMOACAs) who played with Meccano as children and are looking forward to being able to say to their friends in a careless tone “It wasn’t too much trouble!” (Sorry to sound sexist here, but let’s be realistic.)
To ensure that the OCMOACAs lay down strong memories of an emotionally salient IKEA experience, IKEA throws into each box a small bag of miscellaneous bits that are not mentioned in the instructions.
IKEA knows that when the OCMOACAs find these bits left over, they will spend sleepless nights reviewing their IKEA experience and wondering in disbelief where they could possibly have gone wrong.
Over time the anxiety will fade, but the memory won’t. It’s IKEA.
Michael Vnuk said,
March 9, 2025 @ 5:16 pm
Victor writes: 'As I pulled out the wooden parts of the bed frame, the aroma of perfectly, freshly sawn lumber from a Swedish forest filled my room.'
Is the Swedish origin confirmed? I say this because I know that IKEA products come from many places. We have IKEA Lynäs doormats that are made in Egypt and I've drunk from IKEA glasses made in Russia, Bulgaria and France.
I couldn't quickly find the source of the wood used in Neiden bed frames. However, I found an IKEA website that talks about where their wood comes from. In answer to their own question 'Which market supplies the most virgin wood for IKEA products?', their list begins with Poland (29%), Lithuania (13%), Sweden (10%), China (10%).
Victor Mair said,
March 9, 2025 @ 7:11 pm
You are humorless and lack sensitivity to metaphor.
Michael Vnuk said,
March 9, 2025 @ 5:30 pm
I thought that 'IKEA' was 'Swedish for value'. At least, that is an advertising catchphrase that I remember from somewhere. And there is evidence of it on the internet, but not as much as my memory led me to expect. (Yes, I know the correct acronymic origin.)
Victor Mair said,
March 9, 2025 @ 7:10 pm
"I know the correct acronymic origin"
That clinches it.
Robert Coren said,
March 10, 2025 @ 9:05 am
Philip, it turns out that our "certain ages" are the same, within the year anyway. Perhaps your proposed explanation is correct, I don't know.
I have a story about why "of a certain age" has resonance for me, but one of the characteristics of same is a tendency to tell the same story over and over, and I don't know if I've retailed it here before or not.
Rodger C said,
March 10, 2025 @ 12:13 pm
"The aroma of a probably Baltic forest filled the room."
The sentence as written by VM doesn't seem to me to have the formal characteristics of a metaphor.
Victor Mair said,
March 10, 2025 @ 7:08 pm
@Roger C
Were you thinking of a simile?
Jonathan Smith said,
March 10, 2025 @ 9:38 pm
well I believe simile would be "the aroma of a Baltic-ass forest, like, filled my room"
Scott P. said,
March 11, 2025 @ 12:41 am
I think that the "correct" pronunciation of IKEA is "ee-kay-uh", with emphasis on the "ee" sound, similar to the way a native Swedish speaker would say it, not "eye-kee-ah" or "ai-kee-uh" with stress on the second syllable, the way most Americans say it (all the Americans I know)
IKEA's USA division pronounces it the American way in official ads and videos, so why should we expect customers to say it differently?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jn2_nZrivQ
Philip Taylor said,
March 11, 2025 @ 9:56 am
"Expect" ? No, Scott, but worthy of admiration if they pronounce the word correctly [*], would you not agree ? In Britain, very few afford Citroën three syllables, but I admire those who do.
——–
[*] Where "correctly" means "as pronounced in Sweden".
Philip Taylor said,
March 11, 2025 @ 9:57 am
"Expect" ? No, Scott, but worthy of admiration if they pronounce the word correctly [*], would you not agree ? In Britain, very few afford Citroën three syllables, but I admire those who do.
——–
[*] Where "correctly" means "as pronounced in Sweden".
Scott P. said,
March 11, 2025 @ 10:54 am
Philip,
Taking the position that IKEA pronounces its own name wrong seems a bit like being too Catholic for the Pope.
Philip Taylor said,
March 11, 2025 @ 11:23 am
Well, Lidk UK routinely mis-pronounced its name for the benefit of we ignorant monoglot Britons, but that does not stop me from pronouncing it as close to the German version as my limited phonemic inventory will allow … (thereby almost certainly demonstrating my ofermod, of course).
Kate Bunting said,
March 11, 2025 @ 11:57 am
People commonly say "Eye-KEE-a" in Britain too, but our ads say "Ik-EE-a" (in a vaguely Scandinavian accent). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ics5Tn7O7so&t=30s
Philip Taylor said,
March 11, 2025 @ 12:20 pm
Using "eye-spelling" (is that the correct term ?), Kate, I would suggest that most Britons say "Eye-KEE-uh" rather than "Eye-KEE-a", with the final vowel a definite schwa. I believe that the Swedish pronunciation ends with an "a" (/æ/, as in CAT) or similar (maybe longer — /a:/ as in BRA).
Andreas Johansson said,
March 12, 2025 @ 12:00 am
The final vowel is short and fully low in Swedish, more or less IPA [a].
Philip Taylor said,
March 12, 2025 @ 3:59 am
Thank you Andreas. Sadly I have never visited Scandinavia, so have never acquired even a tiny smattering of the languages spoken there.
Scott P. said,
March 13, 2025 @ 4:12 pm
I think there is enough Norse in English to qualify as a smattering. :-) ("Smattering" itself could be of Scandinavian derivation).
Philip Taylor said,
March 16, 2025 @ 5:14 am
It would seem that I lied (unintentionally) — I once delivered a joint presentation (with Charalambos Dendrinos) in the Ars Edendi series in Stockholm, but I have no recollection of hearing any Swedish spoken while we were there …