How Do You Pronounce "Acquia"?

Ack - WHY - uh. Auk - WAH. Auk - WEE - uh.

Ding, ding, ding! That last phonetic spelling is how you pronounce the company name, but back in 2011, we strolled the streets of downtown Boston, where Acquia HQ is located, to find out how the average passers-by say it.

What’s in a name?

The entertaining results hint at the company’s origins in Antwerp, Belgium, where students Dries Buytaert and Hans Snijder developed Drupal, the open source content management system that came to power websites for Conagra, UNICEF, NBC Sports Digital, George Washington University, and more.

In its earliest iteration before it even had a name, Drupal was a small content framework that Dries and Snijder used to communicate with one another. Dries thought “dorp,” the Dutch word for “village,” would be a good fit for the software but mistyped the word when registering the domain name.

The most famous typo in history gave us “drop.org,” but it wasn’t until January 2001, when Dries decided to release the software behind the site that he came up with “Drupal.” Drawing from another Dutch word, “druppel,” which means “drop,” was translated into English as “Drupal,” pronounced “drew-pull.”

The birth of Acquia

Fast forward six years later to Route 128, where entrepreneur Jay Batson hoped to establish a business that could help companies scale and flourish with open source software. Looking through a WWII Navajo Code Talker Dictionary, Jay came across “acquia,” which meant “to spot or locate,” verbs that most closely approached the principles of information and content central to Drupal.

Drupal was just one of two open source software projects Jay had earmarked after combing through hundreds of others, and the relationship between the long-ago “drop” typo and the almost “aqua” spelling of “acquia” seemed almost destined. Jay and Dries met that year, and the rest is history, as they say.

Today, the company is a dynamic business that uses Drupal as the lynchpin to innovative digital experiences that customers from the City of Burnaby in Canada to the UK nonprofit Anthony Nolan now enjoy. But Acquia offers more than just Drupal leadership; it also showcases a range of products and services. From a customer data platform and digital asset management software to a headless content management system and low-code / no-code tools, Acquia provides a full suite of products and services that are a tech-stack must for modern businesses.

To learn more about how Acquia is helping produce the world’s best digital experiences, visit here.