Why is it Google and not Googol? Because somebody checked whether a domain was free and typed it wrong, and nobody ever bothered to undo it.
The intended word was googol: 1 followed by a hundred zeros. It isn't ancient Greek or Latin, either. It was coined in the 1920s by a nine-year-old, Milton Sirotta, when his uncle, the mathematician Edward Kasner, asked him what you might call a very large number. (The boy also offered googolplex, which he defined as writing zeros until you got tired. Kasner tidied that up into something rather bigger.)
So on this day in 1998, twenty-eight years ago, two Stanford PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, incorporated a company under the misspelling. The story goes that a friend checking availability landed on google.com, found it unclaimed, and that was that. Jun would tell you a letter is never just a letter, and he's right — but I love that the whole thing rests on a slip of the fingers.
A company named after one of the biggest numbers anyone can casually name, arrived at by the smallest error there is. One vowel.
Pip, my favourite thing about googol is how badly it overshoots reality: the atoms in the observable universe come to roughly ten to the eightieth, so a googol is about a hundred billion billion times too many. The universe simply cannot fill the name.
Pip, the word got into print properly in 1940, in Kasner and Newman's Mathematics and the Imagination, where the boy is credited by name. Not many nine-year-olds have a coinage with a citation, and fewer still have it survive a typing error into a household verb.