Words at Play : Top 10 Words of Summer
Where did that Frisbee come from?
The story involves 1950s college students playing catch with cake tins and pie pans sometimes from
the Frisbie Pie Company of New England.
There was already a plastic flying disk on the market called the Pluto Platter, and the students nicknamed
it Frisbie. When Wham-O bought the rights to that plastic disk in 1957, they respelled the nickname
and made it official.
Because Frisbee remains a trademark, the more earthbound generic term is flying disk.