Today we celebrate "Fun facts about names" Day

Celebrate names today by looking up interesting tidbits about names.

CYNW gets you started with fun facts about names on this site. Or...maybe you already know the name of Santa’s brother? Surprise! Entertain! Enlighten! Amaze others by sharing what you find. Ask others to share the story of their name. Discuss the exotic names some celebrities name their children.



Born Today in 1995 is HaileyClauson

Notable for her cover modeling work for the Gucci, Jill Stuart, and Dsquared2 brands, this NEXT Model Management client rose to fame during her teenage years.

Extremely popular on social media, she had ten thousand Twitter fans and nearly 100,000 Instagram followers by early 2015.

Initially signed by Ford Models, she began her modeling work at the age of fourteen, booking advertising campaigns for Forever 21 and Jag Jeans.




Today in 1933 the Game of "Monopoly" was invented

The history of Monopoly can be traced back to 1903, when American anti-monopolist Elizabeth (Lizzie) J. Magie Phillips, created a game through which she hoped to be able to explain the single tax theory of Henry George.

It was intended as an educational tool to illustrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies. Magie took out a patent in 1904. Her game, The Landlord's Game, was self-published, beginning in 1906.

A series of variant board games based on her concept was developed from 1906 through the 1930s that involved the buying and selling of land and the development of that land. Cardboard houses were added and rents were increased as they were added. Magie again patented the game in 1924.

According to an advertisement placed in The Christian Science Monitor, Charles Todd of Philadelphia recalled the day in 1932 when his childhood friend, Esther Jones, now married to Charles Darrow, came to their house with her husband for dinner.

After the meal, the Darrows played the game of Monopoly several times with them, a game that was entirely new to the Darrows, and before he left, Darrow asked for a written set of the rules. After Darrow brought his own Monopoly game out, the Todds never spoke to the Darrows again.

By 1933, a variation on "The Landlord's Game" called Monopoly was the basis of the board game sold by Parker Brothers, beginning on 6 February 1935. Several people, mostly in the Midwestern United States and near the East Coast, contributed to the game's design and evolution, and this is when the game's design took on the 4×10 space-to-a-side layout and familiar cards were produced.

The original version of the game in this format was based on streets in Atlantic City, New Jersey. By the 1970s, the false notion that the game had been created solely by Charles Darrow had become popular folklore: it was printed in the game's instructions.