Lego is one of the world’s oldest toy brands, shifting billions of individual parts in production every single year.
If you liked playing with toys when you were a kid, there’s a high chance you might have a memory or two of playing with a Lego set.
From licensed brands like Star Wars and Marvel, to its own original themes like Ninjago and City, Lego’s influence reaches far and wide across its different audiences.
But for all of that fuss, it isn’t exactly common knowledge what the “Lego” in Lego actually means.
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The Lego Group has confirmed in the past what the word actually means, and there’s a rather clever meaning behind it.
“Lego” is a contraction of “leg godt”, a Danish phrase meaning “play well”. The phrase also has a meaning in Latin, meaning “I collect”, “I compose”, “I choose”, or “I read”.
It’s a rather wholesome phrase, something that is rather fitting for the principle when it comes to playing with Lego.
The Lego Group was founded in 1932 by Ole Kirk Christiansen, but its original business strategy was a lot different to the Lego that we know today.
Before it did plastic bricks, Lego manufactured wooden toys between the 1930s and 1950s.
During the ‘50s, it launched the Lego brick as it’s known today, using tubes with interlocking functions. As time went on, new bricks were developed and released in a variety of shapes and sizes, and the rest was history.
Over the years, Lego has continued to innovate on that very simple premise without ever changing how the bricks are designed.
And that’s the cool thing about it, you can fit a Lego brick made in 2025 with a Lego brick from 1975 and there are no compromises made.
Lego has since expanded as a franchise, developing theme parks, video games, films and TV series, and its own stores. The company has 42 offices spread across the world, with 12 theme park locations and hundreds of stores.
One of the most popular Lego themes has been Lego Star Wars, which launched in 1999 and has had nearly a thousand sets released since then.
Lego Star Wars kicked off Lego’s licenced brands, which has since extended to other brands like Indiana Jones, Marvel, DC, Harry Potter, and The Simpsons.