Why is Pixar Pixar?

[nathan]

I just want to know… what’s the story behind the name PIXAR. why did they call it this

[Pewpewpew5522]

PIX = Pix = They make pretty pictures on the screen.
= Picks = They always Picks the best ideas for movies. They’re also a good pick if you have to choose a movie to watch.

ar = Argh = Yarrrr… Maybe they’re pirates? We know WALL-E is.

[WBoon]

Quoted from source:

@Melanie and Mike from "Take Our Word For It"

Pixar - Action (verb) of making pixels in Spanish. According to The Second Coming of Steve Jobs book by Alan Deutschman, Ed Catmull and John Lassetter were looking for a sticky name and came up with Pixer, but they thought it sounded better in Spanish: Pixar… That suggests an existing Spanish verb pixar “to make pixels”, and there is no such Spanish verb, but we found a slightly different version of the story in the San Francisco Chronicle…

Quoted from source:

@Ellen Lee

In Lasseter, they found the artistic talent they had been missing, and recruited him to Lucasfilm. Soon thereafter, Lucasfilm decided to spin off the computer division… They renamed it Pixar, a made-up Spanish verb derived from the word “picture,”

I’d say the latter be the accurate source, though this has been discussed and possibly clarified in the forums already.

Figure I’d do something more around here than whine and sulk…

[nathan]

Thanks for that WBoon… I was guessing it was something from a different language or something to do with the word pixel

[martini833]

Actually…
Alvy Ray Smith came up with a name for Lucasfilm Graphics Division’s new Image Computer, Pixer (invented Spanish word: to make pictures), and somebody else from the company’s Graphics Group thought it would sound better as Pixar, so they went with it. Then they named the company (a separate entity from lucasfilm) after the Pixar Image Computer.
So technically Pixar is named after a computer, but the word Pixar itself is an invented Spanish word (so is Pixer).
So yeah, to make PICTURES.
Source: To Infinity and Beyond, The Pixar Touch, Alvy Ray Smith’s Pixar Site