has the office been dysoned?
James Dyson's wish is "That one day, Dyson will replace 'Hoover' and become a noun, a verb...long after I am forgotten". It only took the Hoover a matter of months between being patented and becoming a verb, according to the Oxford English Dictionary: the Hoover cleaner (named after the US industrialist William Henry Hoover) was patented in 1927 and a publication of the same year, the Army & Navy Stores Catalogue, carried an advert claiming "a Hoovered room..is..free from dust".
It's not clear whether Dyson will ever be used generically as Hoover is, but databases reveal that dysoning was used in the Independent newspaper as far back as January 1996. A Google search brings over a thousand hits for dysoning compared to hoovering (over 269,000 hits).
adapted from an article by Catherine Soanes
