This story is incorrect. I don't know how Brad Stone could have got this wrong, because I told him the actual origin of the name. It did not come from looking up words in a dictionary. It came from a documentary that Jeff watched about the Amazon river. The concept that particular stuck with him was that the Amazon is not just the biggest river in the world, but is 10x larger than the next largest river. In addition to the alphabetic sorting benefits of the name (important back then), Jeff loved the size metaphor.