When naming software projects, Doug Cutting seems to have been inspired by his family. Lucene is his wife’s middle name, and her maternal grandmother’s first name. His son, as a toddler, used Nutch as the all-purpose word for meal and later named a yellow stuffed elephant Hadoop. Doug said he “was looking for a name that wasn’t already a web domain and wasn’t trademarked, so I tried various words that were in my life but not used by anybody else. Kids are pretty good at making up words.” - Doug Cutting