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According to the history section on the official Q-tips site, the "Q" stands for quality. But the familiar cotton-tipped swab wasn't always known by this quirky moniker. In 1923, Leo Gerstenzang noticed that his wife had stuck a bit of cotton on a toothpick and was using it to clean their baby's ears. Thinking that this jerry-rigged swab might cause some damage to the kid, Leo designed a safer cotton swab. He started the Leo Gerstenzang Infant Novelty Company to sell his new creation, which he dubbed Baby Gays. In 1926, he changed the swab's name to Q-tip Baby Gays, and eventually the product name was shortened
to just Q-tips. Over time, the brand name has come to stand for any cotton swab, another example of a propriety eponym like Kleenex or Xerox. While Chesebrough-Pond's, the manufacturer of Q-tips, says the "Q" is for quality, other sources with time to contemplate such conundrums have drawn their own conclusions. Some speculate that the name derives from the profile of the swab itself. We're not so sure about that one, Cecil¿
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