Pinterest

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A social media platform designed for discovering and sharing visual content, often used for inspiration in various creative endeavors
2. An online service that allows users to curate collections of images, articles, and ideas to share and explore based on personal interests
3. A digital tool that enables users to create and manage virtual pinboards where they can gather and organize multimedia content related to hobbies and projects

Etymology: Pinterest is a blend of two ordinary English words, "pin" and "interest," and the name of the service carries the image-saving idea built into it. Users "pin" posts, which means saving them to a personal board, and the platform is built around the things people find interesting. The company launched in 2010, and the name was chosen to describe that core action: putting an item on a board so it can be kept and revisited. Because the platform's own name is the source, the common noun for an online image collection is a derivative of the brand. The word's meaning therefore points back to the service's function: a curated set of images gathered by pinning them. Its etymology is simple, a clipped combination of a verb and a noun, and the surprise lies mainly in how a brand name became a general term.