Magento is pronounced as muh-jen-toe. Using the International Phonetic Alphabet, it can be phonetically transcribed as /mədʒˈn̩təʊ/.
Although Magento is a veteran in the ecommerce industry, first-time users and those new to the industry are often unsure of how its name is pronounced. With over 300,000 developers in its global community, the pronunciation of its name is often influenced by the local dialects of its users and can vary between countries and continents.
As a proper noun, there’s no wrong way to pronounce it. However, for the sake of posterity, you can pronounce it as ‘muh-jen-toe’.
History of Magento
Magento was developed by a team of developers led by Roy Rubin and Yoav Kutner back in 2007. Rubin and Kutner operated a successful web development agency called Varien Inc., which was established in 2001.
With years of experience working with the top open-source ecommerce platforms of their time, Rubin and Kutner found that the available solutions in the market offered limited customizability and they decided to solve that problem by developing their own platform.
They announced the development of Magento in 2007 and officially launched the platform in 2008. Within a year of its release, Magento had surpassed the leading platform of the time, osCommerce, to become the number one open-source ecommerce platform in the market.
The origin of the name “Magento”
As the platform was announced way back in 2007, the origin of its name isn’t as well-known as the platform today.
The first public beta release of Magento was introduced under the name Bento CMS on 31st of August 2007. However, Bento was already trademarked by FileMaker Inc., and to avoid legal conflicts, Rubin and Kutner decided to rename the platform before its official public release.
Bento’s branding was heavily inspired by that of its parent company. Varien’s logo consisted of a magenta-colored, V-shaped letter-mark created using a hexagonal structure. Bento CMS had a similar magenta branding leading many to believe that the name Magento was coined using a combination of the color magenta and the original name Bento.
However, it was influenced by wizards from the popular fantasy role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. The platform’s developers decided to replace the ‘Ben’ in Bento with ‘Mage’ to pay homage to the wizard-like characters in Dungeons and Dragons, thus coining the name we all know it by today — Magento.
Rise of Magento
Soon after its launch, Magento was adopted rapidly by merchants and developers across the world thanks to its highly customizable nature and feature-rich functionality. Shortly after this, Varien launched the Magento Enterprise Edition in 2009 to provide enterprise-level businesses with enhanced marketing and content management functionality.
Noticing the success of Magento, eBay decided to purchase a 49% stake in the company in 2010. Naturally, once it had a taste of the Magento success, they decided to fully acquire it in 2011. They proceeded to integrate their payment system PayPal into the platform to boost its user base.
By 2013, Magento was the number one ecommerce platform in Alexa’s top one million websites for three years in a row. Such was its popularity over the years that Magento had become the most dominant platform in the entire ecommerce industry for the most of a decade.
Google Trends demonstrates that within a year of its launch, the term ‘magento’ was searched more often globally than its primary competitors like ‘shopify’, ‘oscommerce’, ‘woocommerce’, and even the all-encompassing term ‘ecommerce’ until the middle of 2017.
Future of Magento
What began as a pet-project by a team of developers led by two ambitious entrepreneurs in 2007 has now become one of the most robust and feature-rich open-source ecommerce platforms in the world.
In 2021, the name ‘Magento’ is synonymous with high performing ecommerce websites as Adobe continues to deliver industry-leading features and functionality to its users.
Magento Commerce, the present version of Magento Enterprise Edition, has evolved to include AI-powered functionality thanks to Adobe Sensei that allows its users to leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to offer tailored product recommendations to their customers.
With more functionality being introduced to the platform and a growing demand for global ecommerce, Magento users can expect the platform to live up to their expectations and support their online businesses for many more years.