If you are Canadian, the name Purolator is probably a familiar one — and possibly even if you are American, but for a different reason. For those who don’t know, it’s the name of a Canadian courier company, which is now majority owned by Canada Post. For some reason I started wondering where the name came from, since it’s kind of an odd word, so I looked it up, and it was originally the name of an American company that made oil filters (apparently it was supposed to be a contraction of the phrase “pure oil later” or something like that). The founders of the company invented the first commercially available oil filter in the 1920s. It still exists but it is a subsidiary of a German industrial supply company now.
For some reason, Purolator decided to buy a Canadian package delivery company called Trans Canada Couriers in 1967 (maybe it seemed like an extension of the oil filter business because they use a lot of trucks?) and they renamed it Purolator, even though it had nothing to do with the oil filter business. In 1987 the package company was bought by Canadian investors — and eventually wound up being acquired by Canada Post — but they decided to keep the name. Pretty glad I looked it up, because I love weird corporate stories like that! Like Nokia, for example, which started out running pulp mills and making rubber, and Nintendo which was founded as a maker of playing cards in the late 1800s.
Pace the Wikipedia article, the “later” part of the explanation of the Purolator names feels like folk etymology. A more likely explanation is that in English, -ator is a suffix indicating an agent. Think elevator (thing that elevates), terminator (thing that terminates). So Pure-oil-ator would be, roughly, thing that makes oil pure.
Thanks Jonathan — I agree that seems plausible, although the “pure oil later” thing comes from the actual Purolator website in the “our history” section