Target?

01The answer up front

Target was named in 1962 by Stewart K. Widdess, Dayton's then-director of publicity, and his staff. They are reported to have considered more than 200 potential names before settling on Target. The explanation Widdess gave, as later reported by the company, was an analogy to marksmanship. A marksman aims for the bullseye. The store would aim to hit the mark on goods, service, community commitment, price, value, and overall experience. The bullseye logo introduced alongside the name was built to visually echo the word itself, a mark that shows exactly what the word describes. One claim attached to this story circulates widely, that the name was chosen to keep the new discount chain from being confused with the Dayton's department store. That claim sits on shakier ground than the marksman story, and the sections below explain why.

02Where the word came from

Goodfellow Dry Goods, founded in 1902, is where Target traces back to. It became Dayton's Dry Goods Company in 1903, then was shortened to the Dayton Company in 1910. The first Target store opened in Roseville, Minnesota, on May 1, 1962, founded by John Geisse and Douglas Dayton under the Dayton Company banner.

Widdess and his staff are credited with the name and the bullseye logo. Company retellings, recovered through Target's 60th-anniversary materials and corroborated by syndicated coverage on outlets including TheStreet and Yahoo Finance, describe a search through more than 200 candidate names before Target was chosen. Widdess is quoted, in a version reported by Progressive Grocer drawing on Target's own anniversary materials, explaining the choice through the marksman comparison. As a marksman aims for the bullseye, the store would aim to hit the mark on retail goods, services, community commitment, price, value, and overall experience. That quotation should be read as the company's own account of its history, passed through secondary reporting, rather than as verified primary-source text.

The Dayton Company itself went through further changes. By the later twentieth century the parent had become Dayton-Hudson Corporation. In 2000, that parent officially renamed itself Target Corporation, retiring the Dayton-Hudson name at the corporate level while the retail stores had carried the Target name since 1962.

03The sound of it

Target is not an invented word. It is an ordinary English noun that existed long before the retailer did, naming an object or mark aimed at, as in archery or shooting. The brand took that existing word and applied it directly to a chain of stores, then paired it with a bullseye, a mark that draws the very thing the word names. The word and the image describe each other. Someone who has never seen the logo can still picture it correctly from the name alone, because the name already contains the picture.

04Why people remember it

What keeps Target's name alive in ordinary speech is the nickname Tarzhay, a mock-French pronunciation that turns a plain discount store into something dressier. Douglas Dayton, the company's first president, is quoted in Progressive Grocer's 60th-anniversary recap saying he first heard customers call the store Tarzhay in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1962, the same year the first stores opened.

Independent citation research tells a different story about timing. Etymology researcher Barry Popik traced the nickname's earliest print appearances and found Tarjay in 1983 and Tarzhay in 1986, more than two decades after the year Douglas Dayton's recollection points to. Popik's work rests on documented print citations. Dayton's account rests on a single personal memory recorded decades after the fact in company anniversary materials.

Neither account cancels the other, but neither confirms the other either. If customers really were saying Tarzhay in Duluth in 1962, no printed trace of it has surfaced from that decade, or from the following two decades. If the nickname only began circulating in the early 1980s, then a twenty-plus-year gap sits unexplained between the founding and the joke. The company's own retelling does not address this gap at all.

05The company it keeps

The bullseye has changed shape more than the name has. The original red-and-white logo introduced in 1962 was simplified in 1968, when one of its concentric red rings was removed, and it was refined again during the mid-1970s into roughly the version used today. The word Target has not needed that kind of revision. It has stayed the same noun since Widdess's staff chose it.

That stability has carried a lot of range. The company now sells groceries, home basics, apparel, and electronics, across a wide online and in-store footprint. A single plain word and a simplified circle have stretched to cover a shopping trip that might include produce, a television, and a pair of shoes in the same visit, without the name ever needing to change to accommodate what got added to the shelves.

06What the name turns down

Several pieces of the popular Target origin story deserve more caution than they usually get. The claim that the name was chosen to avoid consumer association with the Dayton's department store comes from a sentence in Wikipedia's History of Target Corporation article that carries no footnote of its own. The nearest citation in that article attaches to a later, unrelated sentence about 1965 sales figures. That motive should not be treated as confirmed.

The naming decision is sometimes attributed to Target's founders, a phrasing used in at least one research-database summary. The sources consistently point instead to Stewart K. Widdess and his publicity staff, a distinct role from the store's founders, Douglas Dayton and John Geisse, who ran the retail side rather than the naming search.

The count of names considered should be treated as approximate. Target's own account, through secondary reporting, says more than 200. It should not be reported as an exact figure, and no ledger source here supports a specific number beyond that.

And the 1962 date for the Tarzhay nickname rests on one person's decades-later recollection, not on any document from that year. What stands apart from all of this, well attested across multiple accounts, is Widdess's role, the marksman quotation, and the 2000 renaming of the parent company to Target Corporation.

07Questions that come up

Why did they name it Target? Stewart K. Widdess, Dayton's director of publicity, and his staff are credited with choosing the name in 1962 after considering more than 200 candidates. Widdess is quoted, via company retellings reported in outlets like Progressive Grocer, explaining the choice through the image of a marksman aiming for a bullseye, hitting the mark on goods, service, price, and value.

Why is Target pronounced Tarjay? The mock-French pronunciation is a customer nickname, not an official name. Douglas Dayton recalled hearing shoppers say it in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1962. Separate citation research by Barry Popik finds the earliest printed uses only in 1983, as Tarjay, and 1986, as Tarzhay. The two accounts leave a gap of more than twenty years that nothing in the available record closes.

What was Target called before 2000? The retail stores were called Target from their 1962 opening onward. What changed in 2000 was the parent corporation's name. It had been Dayton-Hudson Corporation, a descendant of the Dayton Company, which itself traced back through Dayton's Dry Goods Company (1903) to Goodfellow Dry Goods, founded in 1902. In 2000, Dayton-Hudson Corporation renamed itself Target Corporation, aligning the parent company's name with the stores that had carried the Target name for nearly four decades already.

08Source ledger