Four in five IKEA rugs on sale in 2022 were named after a Danish town. Of the rugs launched since, one in six is.
Everybody knows how IKEA names things: beds after Norwegian places, rugs after Danish ones, sofas after Swedish towns, curtains after girls, desks after boys. The rulebook is repeated everywhere and checked almost nowhere. Below, every product name IKEA has sold in Britain since July 2022 (4,064 of them, read from the company's own sitemaps and the Internet Archive's copies of them) is put through a gazetteer, a population register and a dictionary, rule by rule. Most of the rules were real. Several are being quietly retired.
Fifteen claims, in the form they are usually repeated, tested on the names on sale today. A rule has to beat the background: the share of every other name in the range that happens to come from the same source. The p value asks how often a random set of names of the same size would score as high; it is recomputed in your browser from 2,000 shuffles.
Rival is the strongest other source for the same names, in red when it comes within a fifth of the claimed one: a category that is as Swedish as it is Norwegian cannot pass as "Norwegian". 2010 is Lars Petrus's hand-labelled IKEA Dictionary, a second opinion on the names old enough to be in it. Wikidata is a second gazetteer, compiled independently of the first; it covers Norway and Denmark well and Sweden poorly (see the instrument, below).
Split every name by when it first appears in Britain: on sale at some point in 2022 (the first year the archive covers, so these could be decades old), or launched since. Same instruments, same rules, two cohorts.
Each row is one rule; on a narrow screen, scroll the chart sideways. The hollow dot is the 2022 range, the solid dot the names launched since January 2023. Green rows are the controls: rules nothing suggests IKEA changed.
Every rug name on sale in each quarter, by what kind of name it is. Pale bars are quarters whose captured sitemaps hold under 60% as many products as the fullest quarter, because the archive missed files or the range was smaller; read their mix, not their counts.
The split above was fixed before looking: everything on sale in 2022 against everything launched since. These are the obvious ways it could be an accident.
The old rugs were Danish towns: TOFTLUND, SINDAL, TVERSTED, KØGE. The new ones are Swedish nouns, and a run of them come from one vocabulary: railways, roads and getting about.
Translations are this page's own. The same move shows up elsewhere: new curtains and bedlinen are moths, wildflowers and folk dances; new desks are sports terms. Use the search below to look any of them up.
Each yes or no above comes from matching a name, letter for letter, against a list. Before any of it was trusted, every list was run over the 1,362 names in Lars Petrus's hand-labelled IKEA Dictionary (about 2010), where a person had already decided what each name is. That gives each instrument a catch rate on real places or people, and a false-alarm rate on ordinary words.
Catch rate on Petrus's places in each country, and how often each list calls one of his ordinary Swedish words a place.
Statistics Sweden lists every first name at least two people go by. At two bearers almost anything is somebody's name. Slide the threshold; the page used 10, fixed before any furniture was tested.
GeoNames knows 362,144 distinct Norwegian names, against 68,839 Swedish: Norway's national mapping agency fed in every farm, hill, bog and skerry. Matched against every feature, 10% of Petrus's ordinary Swedish words turn out to be somewhere in Norway (MALM, IKEA's best-known bed, is a Norwegian village; Petrus says it is the Swedish word for ore). Matched against populated places only, 2% are. Every place figure on this page uses populated places.
Any of the 4,064 names, with when it was on sale in Britain and what each instrument says it is.
Type at least two letters.
ikea.com/sitemaps/prod-en-GB_1..6.xml, read 2026-10-13: 28,699 product URLs. Each URL slug carries the product name, an English description and the article number. Facts about what is on sale; no IKEA text or image is reproduced.