So How Did "Wi-Fi" Come About?

The simple truth is that the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) needed a name for their standard that would be easier to remember than “IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence”. So they hired the marketing agency Interbrand to name it and were given the choice of 10 options.

The organization did, in the early days of Wi-Fi, include the tag line “The Standard for Wireless Fidelity”. Because board members found it hard to imagine having a name that didn’t mean anything and wanted to subsequently explain the name that had been invented for them, but the line was quickly dropped.