Not that long ago it occurred to me that I had no idea what GADLING actually meant. Was it even a real word? Google searches weren’t that helpful, as they kept returning hits to our blog, or on Hob Gadling, “a fictional character from the Sandman comic book by Neil Gaiman,” according to Wikipedia.
I decided to ask the person responsible for naming us, Jason Calacanis, co-founder of Weblogs, Inc. (Gadling’s parent company, now a part of AOL), how he came up with the term.
“I found it using a thesaurus looking around words like hobo, wanderer, etc,” he said in an email. “Perhaps my favorite name of all the [Weblogs, Inc.] blogs.”
According to the Oxford Dictionary of Idioms, “the noun gad is archaic and is now used only [in the expression on the move.] The verb gad, meaning ‘go from one place to another in search of pleasure,’ is more familiar today; both may have their origins in an obsolete word gadling, meaning a wanderer or vagabond.”
So there you have it. Gadling: “to go from one one place to another in search of pleasure.” I like it.